This week, I'm chatting with Giulio Michelon — founder of Belka, a bootstrapped Italian design agency that's grown to over €1 million in annual revenue. Giulio comes from a family of entrepreneurs but deliberately chose to start fresh rather than inherit the family mattress business, driven by the belief the "third generation destroys."

From selling photocopied newspapers in elementary school to landing clients through a casual Facebook message about train app design, Giulio's journey is refreshingly authentic and practical. He opens up about everything from his early pricing struggles to implementing EOS at a 13-person company, and why he puts "sorry mom but I will never finish this" on his LinkedIn education section.

Key insights from our conversation:

• How a two-hour weekend project redesigning Italy's train app generated €1.5 million in revenue

• Why values-based hiring beats skills-based hiring every time

• The counterintuitive power of admitting your weaknesses publicly

If you've ever wondered what it takes to build a profitable agency while staying authentically yourself, this one's for you.

Dive in below!

Belka Quick Stats:

• 🤝 Business Model: Design & Development Agency (Digital Interfaces)

• 💰 Annual Revenue: ~€1M+ (2024)

• 📊 Profit Margin: ~20% (after founder salaries)

• 👥 Team Size: 13 people

• ⏳ Time In Business: 10 years

• 💸 Funding: Bootstrapped, always profitable

• 📍 Location: Northeast Italy

• 🎯 Target Market: Italian B2B SaaS companies needing interface help

Growing up entrepreneurial but choosing a different path...

I was born and raised in a family of entrepreneurs…

I'm from this northeastern part of Italy where basically everybody's dad has a company – it's almost meme worthy. My granddad started a mattress company which is not related to what I do today, but I always saw my dad and my family working in this mom and pop business where they were making mattresses.

Two things I was sure about: I didn't care about mattresses and I really liked video games.

So there was this kind of conflict between video games and "you should help with mattresses." I was like no, there is Metal Gear Solid. This is serious stuff. laughs

Fast forward, I'm going to college…

I picked computer science instead of economics and ended up meeting this professor who at some point said, "Look, I have contacts with Silicon Valley, so whoever wants to chat about that, you just have to ask."

Out of 160 people, I was the only one asking apparently.

Three weeks later I was living in Sunnyvale and interning for a startup in Silicon Valley…

The Silicon Valley awakening...

The idea that people have of Italy – you think fashion, you think dolce vita, you think traditional environment, right? And food. Very good food.

I was completely stunned by Silicon Valley — I had read about it, but it’s one thing to read about it and another seeing the Google campus is as big as your hometown.

I participated in Startup School Y Combinator event…
I met Paul Graham…
I met one of Facebook's co-founders out of luck.

When I came back home, I could see how big the tech industry was, and that this stuff is happening and it's bigger than we expected back home.

Another thing that didn't make me go through with the family business is that I am third generation… I always heard the saying, “first generation builds, second generation expands, third generation destroys.”

So I thought, why bother? This is not going to end well. laughs

I need to restart the cycle.

So I said, "Fuck that. I'm starting from scratch."

I made myself the first generation.

Landing those first clients and finding recurring revenue...

I think the first job was some kind of software tool to evaluate geological risks.

I absolutely have no idea how much we charged for that – maybe €2,000, maybe even less. It took some weeks of work and it was a contact that came from my now co-founder Luca.

What I remember is that we put a lot of effort and care on the interface. It was very pretty and very usable with sliders and other things that weren’t trivial to do back in the day.

But the first REALLY big client that was out of our family network and lasted some years was Carlo Gavazzi Automation.

All agencies have two kinds of customers – the first are projects where you do one or two projects then it’s over. Then there's what we personally called ‘the gorilla client’ that averages between 30 and 40% of the company’s overall revenues.

Carlo Gavazzi was our gorilla…

We worked with them for two or three years, maybe four and averaged like €100k-150k per year.

Once we had that little bit of recurring revenue, everything became easier.

Authenticity as a business strategy...

My university degree on LinkedIn says "sorry mom but I will never finish this."

I made note of that because it’s obvious so many people are trying to be super polished and perfect online, but it comes across so inauthentic.

And it started because my mom really asked "Why are you not finishing your degree?"

Not finishing school is not as tragic as it might be in North America because we don't pay crazy tuition fees, but still she was worried. At the beginning I was actually very scared about that, but after a while I was like, "Mom, I'm hiring people with degrees, so you can hire that expertise when you need it."

But regarding authenticity, I think it's actually very counterintuitive, but I think it's a sign of strength.

Those truths are things that haunted me in the past. I felt insecure about that. One time, my own university asked me to come to orientation day as a special guest, and I was like, "Guys, are you serious about this? I never even finished."

They were like, "Yeah, but we like what you're doing, so just come."

After a while, I started thinking: first, nobody really cares. I'm not a surgeon, so this is not the field where you need that. And I'm not operating as a developer as well – that's not my skill.

I actually think that making peace with the imperfection in the past and talking about that is a great sign of strength. I prefer to convey the story in the way I felt about it and not try to cover it up or sugar coat it, because I feel that comes across as very obvious as a sign of insecurity.

During my twenties I was trying to prove myself right, and if I couldn't live up to expectations that someone else set for me, I wasn't valuable – which is bullshit.

Recognizing the parts of my past that used to make me feel insecure and making peace with them is just the way to go.

And also I like to make jokes. So I felt that was a great punchline. laughs

Content as the ultimate client magnet...

Our biggest customer after Carlo Gavazzi Automation was this startup called Fatture in Cloud, which is literally "invoices in the cloud." They have half a million customers – they're like a €40 million operation.

I met Daniele, the founder, through an article that I wrote about how I would redesign the national train app. I sent it to him on Facebook to ask for feedback like, "What do you think about that?" Six months later, he was like, "Look, we're redesigning our app. We're not as bad as the National Train Station, but we might need help."

I'm sure I sent this article to a lot of different people, but I had faith in my good luck and skill that the right person would resonate with this kind of content, and I ended up hitting the right person.

That article – I think it's now worth €1.5 million in revenue, so I think it's the most valuable two hours of my life, money-wise. It was just a couple hours on a Sunday, me redesigning an app with wireframes, very high level, and putting it on the internet.

Later, we had more strategic success with design systems.

Luca noticed that design system work was going very well in the market. We ended up investing time and energy in building a report about how all the companies in Italy were implementing these systems – what were the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This was probably our best marketing effort since the train article.

We asked ourselves: how do we position ourselves as a leader in a niche, which is design systems for Italian companies?

The niche is small enough to beat every other existing competition.

We needed to produce content, and to produce content we needed to have insights.

So this was a quarter-long initiative…

We interviewed all these people, produced six or seven different articles, webinars, interviews to other companies, and this paid off.

Those are the projects where we have the highest gross margin – I think probably 50% more than just generic digital product implementation. We won business against the big dogs like Accenture, and not because we competed against them in an RFP.

The clients just asked us, "Look, we want to work with you directly."

So now we are a 13-person operation working with national banks.

Building systems without drowning in bureaucracy...

We use this framework called EOS – Entrepreneurial Operating System. We've been implementing that for a couple of years. At the beginning I had the same sensations like, "This is too much work. We're going to drown in bureaucracy."

But the most interesting part is not in adding bureaucracy but in what I ended up removing. The good thing about EOS is that it forces the owner to make firm decisions. You can't try to follow 10 different things at a time, so it forced me to decide, and it's very repetitive in making decisions and making clarity.

The other thing that unlocked my brain: vision, 10-year plans, three-year plans always looked dumb to me.

Like why can't you just adapt through the way?

I was talking with Peldi, the founder of Balsamiq, and he told me something very simple: “You write the vision to give a direction but you can still change it every year. So it's like writing on ice.”

That clicked something in my head because I was like, "Why should I write a vision if I know that it won't be true?" And he was like, "Just to share your thinking so people can see what you're thinking, and then you change your thinking with new information that you gathered through the next quarter or year."

I was like, "Oh, so the issue was that you can't understand what I'm thinking. That's very embarrassing. Let's write that down."

We have quarterly meetings, weekly appointments called L10s with scorecards and issue resolving, and weekly town halls where we review the goals of the year.

It's more work than it looks, but it's necessary work.

The partnership evolution and knowing your zone of genius...

Luca, my business partner, at some point before EOS and building some of our systems was like, "I don't want to do this anymore. I am very tired. I don't like this."

So he started implementing EOS. That’s ultimately how we came to the decision.

Honestly, we aren't always the best at communicating between the two of us – it's really hard having a partner in life and in business.

Sometimes I just listen to Luca and surrender, like, "You look so convinced that I'm not going to battle through this." Operations – Luca is very deep in vision and knows how the company works better than me.

We are hiring a general manager, so I can concentrate on meeting people, gathering insights, understanding what is going on in companies and teaching the story.

We both tried the role and Luca really didn't like it – he was like, "I hate that managing is my sole job. I like building stuff."

To me it was like, "I hate that managing people is my sole job. I like telling stories and listening to stories."

We ended up being very tired – both of us.

Accepting that I'm very good at things at my own company hasn't been easy to be honest. I felt a little bit uneasy at the beginning talking about these things with Luca, especially as the founder of the company.

Values-first hiring in a small but growing team...

We go through a very diligent four-step interview where the first steps focus on values and the final steps focus on skills. Our values are very clear to the team. We keep insisting on them, showing examples of when the values are applied and when they're not.

I think that the real deal breakers are values.

I couldn't imagine myself telling this 10 years ago.

I was like, "Yeah, this mumbo jumbo guru stuff, values and hippies and whatever. We need to do business." But now I just discovered that good employees share probably like 99% values and then you need the skills to actually do the work.

You can teach skills but you can’t easily teach someone to bring that sense of magic to their work. Magic is my favorite value because it's something unique each person brings to the team – it's like your zone of genius. You can use that to make things incredible because that's your unique skill.

We ask questions to test how they behaved in the past, because past behavior is reliable data while everything else is just speculation.

For example, "What is an opinion you changed?" – those are classic HR questions.

The worst answer I can get is "I never change an opinion." I'm like, "Good luck with that."b

The future vision: from execution to insights...

There are a couple of things that I don't want to be true in the future.

The first thing is to be in the domestic market.

We've worked with some companies outside of Italy, but we’re not an international company.

This makes us very fragile – we are heavily linked to the domestic economy.

The other thing I don't want is to be linked to execution as much as we are today. We started as an agency that helped you design and develop interfaces. We were very strong in execution, very early on a lot of technologies – React Native, Figma. We are teaching Figma to other companies migrating to new technologies.

I think this part won't be what will help us going forward, both because there are technology constraints that will make it not very interesting – namely the AI changes that are going to happen. That will make the execution of projects less valuable, unless you're working on highly technical stuff.

Web development has been in the market for a while.

I don't think there's a lot of stuff that's really hard to execute.

If you have to build a new Figma, that may be more complex, but if you need to do the next ‘invoices in the cloud’ software, I think you probably can have AI code in two to three years.

Where I want to go is deeper on research, insights, and being an information business basically. Having a depth of understanding in the field of digital products that is deeper than everyone else – that's where I want to invest.

One thing we notice is that when companies can't communicate through their product interface, ironically the issues are in the communication of the company itself. The issue most of the time is that internal communication is as messy as external communication. The accountability chart is messy, the rituals to keep everyone aligned are missing.

When we interviewed 30 tech companies in Italy, we learned that the issues were not skill-based. The big elephant in the room was "I give my design to the developers and they don't understand shit." Spoiler: you're not including your developers in the design process, and that's why they are confused and pushing back.

You can't communicate to your customers, you can't communicate to yourself – it must feel very painful.

These are the next 10 years of Belka.

Some things are already happening – one is the podcast I'm running. I interviewed Andrew Wilkinson as the first one out of Italy.

The plan is building content and building insight into the real issues of digital products and specifically interfaces.

Becoming the ‘CEO morning routine meme’fix ...

Three or four years ago I was going through a very bad breakup – the worst breakup of my life. I ended up crying for a couple of weeks on the floor, and this is not a metaphor…

It's not hyperbole.

This is what happened.

Luca was calling me like, "Where the f* are you? What is going on?"

I was like, "I'm so sad. I just can't work. I'm sorry."

I was angry because I hadn't seen it coming. I just crumbled.

I ended up telling myself: I need to understand how to first not make this happen again, and how to be happy again because I was probably depressed. I started tracking everything about my health. I discovered I wasn’t very good at understanding my own body – my head is very disconnected from my body.

Ironic given the fact that my family was producing mattresses, but I've been having trouble with my sleep. I've been sleeping five, six hours after a life of eight hours of sleep. I downloaded this app called Rise to help figure out how I should sleep.

So heart rate variability, resting heart rate, how much I sleep, my diet, understanding my body composition – all these things to understand how to feel good. I ended up living like an athlete monk – I stopped drinking alcohol, I stopped drinking caffeine, I'm currently waking up at 5:30 because birds are singing.

I ended up doing the same things that CEO motivational stories on YouTube suggest, but out of empirical tests. Like the caffeine – I stopped taking that two or three weeks ago. I really like coffee, but my resting heart rate wouldn't go down. I was drinking one coffee per day and I was like, "I need to cut that."

I'm becoming one of those CEO morning routine guys, just trying to be happy.

Maybe YouTube gurus figured something out that I was just skeptical about. laughs

That’s it for this issue!

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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

This week, we're chatting with Nick Shaw — co-founder and CEO of RP Strength (Renaissance Periodization), the fitness company behind tens of millions in subscription revenue, over 3 million Youtube subscribers and one of the most trusted names in evidence-based training and nutrition.

From personal training across NYC subway stations to building a 30-person team generating $20+ million annually, Nick shares the real story behind RP's growth — including a $100K app development disaster, the $2-5M revenue "messy middle" stage that nearly had him burning out, and why authenticity beats viral marketing every time.

If you've ever wondered how to scale from services to products without losing your sanity, this one's packed with hard-earned lessons.

Dive in below!

Quick Stats

🤝 Business Model: SaaS fitness apps + digital products + coaching
💰 Annual Revenue: $20-30 million
👥 Team Size: 30-35 people (including coaches)
📊 Profit Margin: 50%+
💸 Funding: Bootstrapped
📱 Revenue Breakdown: 80% apps, 15% YouTube, 5% other
⏳ Time In Business: 12+ years
😤 Times Almost Quit: At least once

Starting the fitness journey...

This is mostly all I've ever done…

I've been running RP along with my colleague and co-founder, Dr. Mike, since around 2011, 2012. Before that I was actually a personal trainer in New York City, straight out of college.

Dr. Mike and I both went to the University of Michigan — that's where I met him in the student weight room, because we're just a couple of meatheads that like to lift weights. He convinced me to do a powerlifting meet and I was hooked. I needed something competitive to channel that competitive drive I always had growing up playing sports.

He was two years ahead of me in school, finishing his master's degree from Appalachian State while I was finishing up my undergrad at Michigan. He was going out to New York City and said, "Hey, why don't you give some thought to coming out here and being a personal trainer with me."

I'd never been to New York City in my entire life, so I thought it seemed interesting. One of my roommates from college drove out there — it's like a 10-hour drive. We show up Saturday morning, probably around 2 AM, 116th Street up near Columbia.

It was my first experience ever in New York City.

I got the job and was there for almost two years before I started doing some training on my own. Then that morphed into Dr. Mike and I coaching people online around 2012.

Recognizing the online opportunity...

When I first started it, we didn't know online coaching would become what it is today. Here's how it worked: Mike had left New York City and was down at East Tennessee State getting his PhD in sport physiology. I was still in New York. We were referring people back and forth because I was only training people in person and he was coaching people online.

It was not a big thing back in 2012. Maybe even 2011. We kept doing that and thought, "Why don't we just start a company where you and I are in business together?"

We never thought it would grow into something where we were doing different digital products and apps. It was just him and I coaching people online. This was when you could get a lot of bang for your buck on Facebook…

You didn't have to spend any money on paid ads. You posted something, all of your friends saw it, their friends saw it if they commented.

We had a really simple business model: coach people online, do a really good job, provide good customer service, make sure we're friendly and prompt.

We get people results, the rest will take care of itself.

That was literally how we started.

Social media started to take off…

We had to hire more coaches to keep up because it started to spread. Luckily, Dr. Mike was in a PhD program, so he had other students down there that already had master's degrees or were studying sport physiology at the PhD level. It was a very natural progression to hire some of his classmates as coaches.

The pivot from in-person to online...

I was still training some people in person in New York City, and I just remember thinking, I can't do this forever. I'm up early, I gotta train late, I'm all over the city — up and down the subway, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, midtown, downtown…it was a lot.

When I started to first get into online coaching, I was like, wow, this is really cool. I can sit at home and write programs and respond to emails, and I don't have to travel all over New York City.

Maybe when I first started online coaching, I was about 95% in-person, 5% online. Over the years, it started to shift — 75/25, then 50/50, and then all of a sudden the coaching became more online. When my wife and I left New York City in 2015, I've never had to train anyone in person ever since then.

The first digital product breakthrough...

2014 came around and someone suggested, "Hey, you should get on Instagram." Instagram was the perfect medium for us because before-and-after pictures were a huge thing.

We decided Dr. Mike would create all the products.

He wrote The Renaissance Diet 1.0 that came out in October of 2014. When we launched this ebook, it sold several thousand copies in the first week at around 30 bucks a copy. All of a sudden, we're making $60,000, $90,000, $120,000 in the span of a weekend or a week.

That's where we started to see the future is probably selling digital products. How do we take this coaching model that we have, which is a little bit expensive, and make this into a product that people can just buy?

Mike took literally just a weekend to create a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that were based on a person's gender and weight classes with built-in diet progressions. If we're coaching someone and they stall out, I know exactly what I'm going to do. You can set up algorithms and progressions — it's not that hard.

So in February of 2015 we came out with what's called the RPD templates — these Excel spreadsheets. We had no idea how well they would do, but we thought this was kind of cool.

We launched them and they sold maybe a thousand or so at 80 bucks a pop.

Then something really interesting happened. About two to three months later, the people that bought them originally started posting their results online. That is when it really started to take off because people started mentioning us, sharing their pictures on Instagram. It took on a life of its own.

We started working with some small to mid-sized influencers that were using our products, getting good results. I ran our Instagram account, which is now over 900K or something. At the time it was in the thousands. I remember every milestone that we hit — 10K, 25K, 50K, 100K. These were really big milestones.

Those first big revenue moments...

I grew up probably lower middle class in a rural town of about 2,000 people. My dad worked in tool and die, and we didn't make a whole lot of money. My mom was a waitress. We never really had a lot of money.

When Mike and I first started, we're like, "I don't know, we could make like $100K a year? That would be amazing." Then all of a sudden you start doing this...

I remember in 2016, we would run sales selling templates at $79 instead of $99. That was probably some of the first times I learned about scarcity. When we tell people it's their last chance to get the sale, it's astounding how many people buy and how fast it is.

I remember in 2016, we would run sales selling templates at $79 instead of $99. That was probably some of the first times I learned about scarcity.

We’d run a sale Friday through Sunday…

Usually it does well at the beginning, tails off a little bit on Saturday. And guess what? When we tell people it's their last chance to get the sale, it's astounding how many people buy and how fast it is.

I just remember sitting in Miami with Mike, and I would look at the orders coming in. I'm talking every second an order would be coming in — that's $80. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just remember thinking, I don't even know what the fuck to do. This is crazy. This is absurd.

I remember thinking, how do I not mess this up?

Neither of us came from money. Mike was born in Moscow, came to Detroit when he was 7 and lived in Section 8 housing. We're just like, what do we do?

We basically did one of two things: invest some back into the company and invest a bunch into stocks because we're like, what happens if this stops? We know what it's like to grow up without any money.

It was a really trippy feeling…

It is one of the coolest feelings in the world knowing that many people are interested in your stuff.

The painful app development lessons...

We definitely knew we had product-market fit when we started selling the diet templates. So we thought, we can probably make this into an app. The first struggle was maybe why we were in Miami — we went down there with some app developer.

They heavily insinuated it would cost around $100,000 to $150,000. This is 2016…

We probably paid them $40K already to go over the initial spec sheet. Then they come back with their scope of work and it was literally 7x what they insinuated. We're just like, "F off, we're not doing this."

Then we ended up working with someone local here in Charlotte — another complete disaster.

They just didn't understand what we were trying to do.

Then we kind of lucked into Andrew. He didn't work for RP at the time, but he knew Mike through online stuff. He came out and was like, "Hey guys, I'm a software developer. I really like RP stuff. I really like what you guys are doing. Can I help?"

That was 2017, and he basically just led the charge ever since then as creating the diet app. I think it helped having someone that knew what we were trying to do, lived the lifestyle — that was a big help.

A lot of people, if they are service providers and they decide to get into the product stuff — I would never in a million years recommend that you go build your own app…

Go find a coaching platform software that can do 80% of what you want.

The 20% that's missing is not worth the headaches and hassle of probably a three-year process and probably end up spending at least half a million dollars.

Structuring partnerships and equity...

That's a loaded question because it was not this thing that just worked perfectly from day one.

For the longest time, it was a battle because we didn't know how to structure it properly.

We did a lot of stuff on a handshake deal for the longest time. If anyone's into law and they're reading this, they're like, "Oh my God, this guy's stupid."

I hear that.

But Mike and I operated on literally a handshake deal, and there's probably no one in this world that I trust more along with my wife.

We knew how to create win-win situations rather than win-lose.

One of the benefits that most of the RP people have is we've always been more long-sighted.

Let's play the long game.

It's not worth it to screw people over or do something the wrong way to gain a couple extra dollars right here, right now, even though it's going to cost us in the long run.

As of last year, 2024, we actually had a restructure and are set up much more typical to a traditional tech company. There were definitely some tricky parts along the way — for the longest time, our app team was only incentivized by app sales, so there was always this bit of like, they don't really care how the rest of the company's doing.

There were definitely some tough moments and decisions, but now everyone's in alignment.

Navigating the messy middle… ($2-5M Revenue)

Once we figured out some email automations that allowed our digital products to be sent automatically, it unlocked maybe the first true hockey stick for RP. I remember it caused all sorts of issues where my wife and I had to run all of our customer service.

It was a very trying time because we also had two small kids at the time and we could not take a single day off. We could not take time off because we would only get further behind. Before we would go to sleep at night, every email was caught so we could at least start the next day "fresh."

We had a full-time nanny and we would hire a babysitter on the weekends because we had to work…

A break to us would be going to Costco for the afternoon, maybe going out to lunch. We're like, hey, let's try to put away our phones for two, three hours. Let's go to the grocery store, we'll go eat some real food, sit down.

You do that for a year and a half, two years, you kind of hate everything. Throw in two small kids to the mix — yeah, it's a recipe for stress and burnout.

It was absolutely the closest to burnout I've ever come.

That was probably at least one time I almost quit because sitting there, it was tough, man.

We knew that we had to hire some people. We ended up hiring our first-ever customer service person.

We were hesitant because of the time we’d have to take away from the business to train someone, but then we did it anyway.

It sucked for a little bit, and then we started to notice things being taken care of, so we could spend time on tasks we’d been neglecting.

I was never one that was like, "I need to know everything."

I always thought along the lines of, can we bring on a consultant part-time?

I don't know anything about email marketing. Cool, let's bring in a guy that knows some stuff.

It's a very hard spot to be in because you don’t want to hire a full-time person because you know no one cares as much as I do, but it’s impossible to do everything.

Usually when you're not in it, it's a much easier thing to see. When you're in it, it's not easy to see.

Learning leadership and management...

When you're a smaller company, your hands are in everything. As the team grew over time, it became trickier to completely let go of stuff. Nowadays, most of my days are spent on meetings with people — what are we working on? What's going on? What's the update for this week? What's the plan? Are we on track?

A lot of times I kind of feel lazy.

I'm like, do people think that I'm not doing anything?

I'm asking, "Do you guys need help with some emails? Do you guys need help with social media?"

Most of the time they're like, "No, we got it. We're good." They can do the job better than I can.

I don't have a huge ego, which probably plays into a strength of how you can become a good leader. Lots of reading, learning, podcasts, joining various groups. I was in EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) for a while and then for the last almost three years I've been in Vistage.

Vistage has been great because it's all founders or CEOs in the group — 12 people get together every month. Business is business and people problems exist in essentially every type of business you can imagine. You get to learn and see how other people do stuff and gain insights from businesses smaller than yours and much larger than yours.

If you want to be a leader, you don't have to have all the right answers.

Mike and I don't know much about coding — that's why we have Andrew.

He knows a lot about coding. Andrew recruited our whole software engineering team, people he used to work with. They're all very senior-level guys. We never would have been able to do that.

I think that I'm probably pretty good at business development, relationship building, especially with people in the fitness space. I usually get along quite well with people, and I think that's played to my advantage.

The importance of authenticity in marketing...

I just treated Instagram like a game — what works?

Let's try some stuff.

The cool part was probably 90% of the content was generated by our users. I would just share the best stuff. I'm not a creative person when it comes to social media, but I just kept using other people's stuff and funneling it onto the main page.

A lot of these strategies don't really work anymore…Things change over time.

But it was always just an experiment — what's working? Cool.

Hey, I think this is going to work.

Oh, that bombed.

It's just a lot of trial and error.

Now, because we've been around long enough, I've seen when you don't really care about something that you're promoting, it shows.

People can see through it.

Maybe in 2017, 2018 you could get away with promoting some detox bullshit, but nowadays people see right through that.

The biggest part is really just leaning into stuff that you authentically like, love and use.

Our apps — we use them every day. The couple partner companies that we work with on our YouTube channel, like Genius Shot — we use it, I love it. It's the only supplement we've ever promoted.

Here we are a decade later — we've had lots of opportunities to do our own supplements, but we didn't.

Why?

Because there's so many supplement companies, it's all more or less the same. But Genius Shot is something we'll get on board with because we do think it's the way of the future.

You really have to lean into the authenticity around stuff.

Obviously if you're just starting out, it takes a long time to build up an audience.

You don't need many people — you can make a hell of a living, six maybe even seven figures, just from coaching people with a higher-ticket model.

You don't need a crazy amount of followers.

Key lessons and advice...

Extreme Ownership was one book that I thought was really good — it's written by Jocko Willink.

You listen to enough of his podcasts, it becomes clear that if you want to be a good leader, you probably have to be pretty humble.

You don't need to know it all.

Stephen Covey's 7 Habits talks about being proactive, not reactive…

Something that successful people have in common is this internal locus of control — stuff happens, can I do anything about it? If not, I'm going to try to focus on what I do actually have some control over.

You really have to care about people.

If you approach people from just a transactional thing, people don't love that.

They see through it.

But if people know that you actually give a crap about them, they're probably more willing to do those things.

Current operations and future thinking...

We're somewhere in the $20 to $30 million range with probably 30 to 35 people if we include our coaches. Our profit margins are quite high — over 50%.

Our people are all quite well compensated.

That's just not how I want to do business…

We have a model where we're okay having one person that's probably worth one and a half, two people and paying them above average. Most of the people we hire are referrals, and because we have a big audience, it's usually not hard because people are attracted to the company.

We're not going to treat people like crap.

We're going to pay them above average — 75th percentile, something like that. You do that, treat people well — we don't have a lot of turnover.

I think that we will continue to make our apps better and better. If we do that and continue to put out tons of free content, those two things will probably take care of themselves.

I'm only 37.

The oldest person in our company is early 40s, so we've got some runway ahead of us.

Does that mean an exit? I don't know.

You never know what the future's going to hold.

If someone comes in, a tech company wants to offer a bunch of money because fitness is a big thing and health is a big thing — we'd be silly not to listen.

But no immediate plans because someone asked what I would do if I didn't do RP right now?

I’d probably coach people in the fitness space. laughs

I like everyone that I work with…I get along well with them.

We've got a good thing going and we're all aligned.

I'm not looking to get out anytime soon.

This week, I'm chatting with Simar Anand — a lawyer by day, restaurant owner by night, and search fund operator in between. After losing his father to COVID-19, Simar took over the family restaurant rather than closing it down, despite already having a successful legal career.

Rather than pursuing work-life balance, Simar embraces a philosophy of harmony and acceptance across his multiple ventures. From hiding his restaurant work from his law firm to now openly building multiple businesses that preserve legacies, his story demonstrates how purpose and intention can transform impossible workloads into meaningful pursuits.

If you've wondered how to pursue multiple passions without burning out, this conversation is packed with wisdom.

Dive in below!

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Quick Stats:

• 🤝 Businesses: Corporate law practice, restaurant, acquisitions search fund

• ⚖️ Law Practice Team Size: Solo practice (previously at a large firm)

• 🍽️ Restaurant Established: 2001 (Taken over in 2020)

• 👥 Restaurant Weekly Covers: ~200 customers per week (40 per night)

• 💰 Restaurant Annual Revenue: $500-600K

• 📊 Restaurant Profit Margin: 8-10%

• 🔎 Search Fund Activity: Reviewing ~22 CIMs monthly

• 📍 Location: Montreal, Quebec

Managing multiple careers…

First off, let me preface by saying, I'm not trying to chase work-life balance here. I'm curating my energy in a way that allows me to focus on what's most important in that moment.

And that's how I get through my day.

Juggling three very unforgiving careers, right?

Being a lawyer alone is a full-time job…
Being a restauranteur alone is a full-time job.
Trying to find a business to acquire and setting up a search fund is a full-time job.

I've given up on chasing work-life balance.

Balance means symmetry…There's an equal amount of both.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

There are some days when I'm more lawyer than I am chef.
There are some days when I'm more chef than I am lawyer.
There are some days when I'm more son or boyfriend or grandson than I am any of the other two things.

You really got to be present in the moment.

And before we get to the how, I think I have to ask myself why, right?

Because if the why is strong enough, right, the how will figure itself out on its own.

For me, law fuels my mind.

The mental gymnastics and arithmetics that I have to do to develop a strong position for my clients when we're negotiating something with the opposite side – that exercise fuels my mind.

And then at 4pm I pack up my laptop, throw on my chef's coat, and make my way to the restaurant.

And I rest.

I spend the rest of the evening feeding my soul.

To that balance between fuelling my mind and feeding my soul is my why.

I think life is too short to spend your entire life just doing one thing over and over again on rinse and repeat.

Being on my feet at all times and spending most of my day putting out different fires – I live off that energy.

And I need both to feel complete. For me, doing just one would be incomplete.

The journey from corporate law to entrepreneurship...

Pretty simple kid. Born Montreal, lived in Montreal my whole life.

Quebec was not as open and embracing of other cultures then as it is today.

I grew up in an anglophone part of town, a lot of my friends were all francophone, and at home I was speaking Punjabi. So there were always at any given moment three or four different languages going on in my head.

I got picked up and brought to my dad's restaurant after school.

I grew up most of my life in my old man's restaurant, helping him with the business.

I always think back to my time being involved in the family restaurant and it gave me early lessons in obviously hospitality, but also resilience and building connections with people.

That's the one thing that I think has really held my hand and gotten me through so much in life outside of the family business.

I ended up at McGill, studied finance, and worked in finance for a bit. W

orked for the Department of Commerce for the United States government advising on foreign trade and bilateral relations.

Little fun fact – the department of commerce, at least out of the Montreal consulate, shares an office with Homeland Security and so most of my day was spent in a bomb shelter underneath the embassy. It was a really cool experience seeing how government works and diplomacy works from that angle.

Eventually law school happened at the University of Windsor. I packed up my life in a suitcase and moved to Windsor. That was a bit of a culture shock – being a big city boy, then moving to Windsor.

I had spent most of my time in law school thinking I was going to be a human rights lawyer. I was going to fight for the underdog and fight for people's rights and stick it to the man.

Then during recruitment season in second year of law school, I had one of the biggest corporate law firms in the country dangle a really shiny carrot in front of me and say, "Hey, come work for us" and be a corporate lawyer. I accepted, and the last seven years after graduating law school, I spent most of my time working in a corporate setting as a corporate lawyer.

I describe myself as your friendly neighborhood corporate lawyer today, but it really is fulfilling.

We have such interesting people walking through my doors every day who have brilliant ideas and are trying to find ways to start businesses around those ideas, commercialize them and bring them to market.

A lot of times the ideas they're coming to me with are very impactful ideas that can do good for the world.

If I could be a small part of that equation, advising them from a legal perspective on how to grow and scale their business so that it can have greater impact in the world, I think I'm still doing meaningful work.

Preserving family legacy through the restaurant...

Unfortunately in the first wave of the pandemic I lost my father to COVID. Young guy – he was 55 years old when he passed away. COVID got to him early before it even had a name and there were any vaccines out there.

This beautiful restaurant that I had grown up in, that he had built from the ground up when he left India and moved to Canada – this beautiful restaurant sort of fell into my lap overnight.

Every person and their mother was telling me "close down the restaurant. You don't need it anymore. You've got a very successful career. You're a big shot corporate lawyer on Bay Street."

They said the restaurant is a fixture of the past and it's not something that you need today.

But there was something inside me that said, "I am who I am today because of the lessons that I learned in that restaurant. I am who I am today because of the work ethic that I saw in my father as he slaved away in the kitchen every day chopping onions."

And so I had to figure out a way to keep that going.

I found so much fulfillment in preserving my dad's legacy in the restaurant.

The exercise of preserving and growing legacy can be very fulfilling and I wanted to find a way to multiply that.

When I'm at the restaurant, when I'm running a dinner service from 5:00 to 9:00, I'm not just sitting back there cooking food.

I'm trying to preserve a legacy and grow a legacy for that matter.

Extending the legacy concept through a search fund...

That legacy preservation piece is also what motivates me in my search fund and getting out there and finding businesses to acquire.

They're all connected somehow.

In the way I'm preserving legacy in my dad's restaurant, I also want to find other family businesses, small to medium-sized businesses that operate on very robust business models and have a lot of potential but don't have the right succession plan in place.

I want to support those businesses in preserving and growing their legacies by taking equity stakes in their companies.

We've got very clear criteria that we're measuring and assessing every business against. There are hard financial criteria – it has to have a certain EBITDA, a certain growth margin, it has to have a certain number of employees, it has to have been around for a certain number of years.

But then there are some of the softer criteria as well.

What is the potential for this business to have a more positive impact on some of those external stakeholders?

I've been searching for that first acquisition that our search fund is going to make for eight months now and I still haven't signed a single LOI (Letter of Intent).

I had lunch with one of my mentors in this space a couple weeks ago and I was telling him, "George, I am reviewing CIMs day and night. I'm reviewing term sheets day and night outside of advising my clients on legal matters and cooking up a storm at the restaurant."

That's what I spend the rest of my time doing – reviewing these business opportunities, but I can't find the right business to acquire.

His response to me was, "Well, then you're looking at it the wrong way. Why are you looking for the perfect deal? You're never going to find the perfect deal. The perfect deal doesn't exist."

"In fact, if the deal is so perfect, my advice to you would be not to buy it, not to pull the trigger and sign an LOI or submit an LOI because there's no value that you can add if the business is so perfect. You want the messy businesses. You want the ones where there are gaps in efficiency. There are things that need to be addressed."

So that's another criteria that we've now added to our list – what are the businesses that are typically run inefficiently, haven't caught up to the advancements of technology, or haven't found leaner ways to operate.

We're going through an environment in the next 10 years where a lot of these SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses) will shut down because they have no succession plans in place, and that's an opportunity.

Empowering these SMBs to continue in some way or another, whether it be with a different management team in place but keeping the owner-operator on as a passive shareholder, finding ways to continue those legacies – it's one thing I'm already working on day and night at the restaurant.

And the type of law that I practice is M&A, so oftentimes my clients are either buying or selling their businesses.

It's already something I'm empowering my legal clients to do in the way that I give them legal advice, whether that be on a buy-side mandate or a sell-side mandate.

So it all ties together, even if it seems random.

Building effective teams and mastering delegation...

I am able to do what I'm doing today because I've got great teams.

Like I said, I could sit here and talk about time management, but there's so much more to it.

Building the right team to support you – there's so much that goes into making sure you're picking the right people that you're surrounding yourself with and they're all rolling in the same direction.

I have this philosophy that one of my senior mentors once described to me, and I've adopted it for God knows how many years now – I am constantly trying to find ways to be the dumbest person in the room.

And that includes my own team members, whether that be at the restaurant, in my law practice, or the interns that I'm bringing on to help with my search fund. You always want to be the dumbest person in the room, and not try to suggest that you know it all.

When you're building these teams, it's making sure that everyone that's on this boat with you understands that you are rowing in an environment that allows for mistakes.

Making sure everyone appreciates that no one is expecting perfection — that's how you find the right people. Now, if you've got people on your team who understand that it's okay to make mistakes, but once a mistake is made, look at that as an opportunity to learn and grow from.

Mistakes are OK, but if no one's looking at that mistake as an opportunity to learn, and then that mistake is being repeated, there's a different conversation that needs to be had.

I come from an environment, especially in corporate law, where that wasn't necessarily the case. It's a high pressure environment where a mistake can result in millions and millions of dollars of lawsuits.

That's a reality – I don't actually exaggerate that.

When we're drafting these contracts where there's a lot of money on the line, not building in the right language in a provision can cost a lot of money, so perfection was expected.

But I try to make sure people are comfortable, and delegate enough responsibility to an individual where they feel like they have skin in the game.

It's really hard to find employees who will operate a business as if it's their own.

They may not be like that day one, but I try to instill those values into those employees – "Hey, I'm expecting you to run this business as if it were your own business. You're not just an employee here."

That "carrot" will look different for different types of people. For someone like me, when someone gives you a certain responsibility, you will go the whole nine yards to make sure you fulfill that responsibility to the best of your abilities.

That alone is enough of a carrot – that I’ve been entrusted with a responsibility.

For others, there are financial metrics and incentives that you can put in place. I'm currently in the process of negotiating a profit-sharing agreement with one of my managers at the restaurant just to align our interests a lot more.

We're building out a new arm of the restaurant business – catering.

I've asked one of my managers internally to lead that effort, and we're going through the process of negotiating how she will be compensated.

Using time with intention...

I heard someone once say that if you're really good at time management, you can pick up a lot more hours in the day. Time will begin to stretch when you're good at time management.

I don't know if that's necessarily true — everyone gets the same 24 hours…

But I do think time starts to become more elastic when you use it with intention.

If you are looking at the hour ahead and you're saying, "I'm going to spend this next hour present with the intention of achieving X or Y…"

I think you end up achieving more in that same hour than you would otherwise.

It's not like you're getting more hours, but if you can shut off the distractions, you can make the most of the little time you have to apply to that problem.

So, if I've only got an hour in the day to look at a term sheet, I'm going to give it my all.

I might have to put it aside after 45 minutes and pick it up again later, but those 45 minutes will be dedicated to just that.

I am a bigger proponent of acceptance and letting go of this concept of perfectionism.

Trust me when I tell you this, I have missed enough deadlines in my life…

I've made enough mistakes.

But I start every day with a clean slate and I tell myself that the next 24 hours are an opportunity for me to learn and grow regardless of how they go.

Embracing imperfection as part of the process is huge for me.

Building relationships for business development...

There are a couple of different ways I build the pipeline for my search fund.

I've got access into a network of entrepreneurs, owners, operators who I advise from a legal perspective. That allows me to gauge when I think they'll be ready to sell and whether I will be the buyer on the other side of that transaction.

The second way is building really good relationships with accountants. So much of my day is spent reaching out to accountants.

When a person is ready to sell their business, the first person they talk to is their accountant.

Making sure I've built good enough relationships with these accountants so that they could send their clients my way when they need legal advice, but also when they're ready to sell, so that I get first dibs on reviewing and analyzing the opportunity.

The third way is probably the hardest, but the most enjoyable, is picking up the phone and calling owner-operators and just shooting the shit with them.

These owner-operators are so caught up in the day-to-day operations of their business, they rarely get an opportunity to take a step back and talk about the future of their business and talk at a higher, more strategic level.

Eventually the goal is to build a strong enough relationship with these owner-operators that when they are prepared to sell, they're thinking of me.

And sometimes the conversation ends up going in the direction where they never even thought of selling, but you're convincing them that now is the best time more than ever to sell.

Part of my exercise in the last couple of months has been connecting with the chambers of commerce within a number of areas and saying,

"Hey, you have a membership of 200 to 500 businesses in your area...I'm a lawyer.

How would you like if I gave a 45-minute webinar or presentation to all of your members for free?"

Nine times out of 10, they're like, "Absolutely. Come on in. If you want to talk to our membership about how to navigate the current tariff environment, please do so."

All of a sudden I now have an audience of 200 businesses.

There must be someone in that pack that's thinking about selling…

And so it's getting in front of these businesses, building relationships with them, encouraging them, inviting them to reach out to you down the road if they're thinking about selling or if they have any other legal issues.

In that way, I start to build a pipeline of businesses for the search fund as well.

When we walk into rooms to pitch people on what we can offer them, we try to outsmart them or make it sound so complicated to instill fear in them.

That turns people away more than anything.

So much of what we do in our lives, whether we are chefs, lawyers, or people working in finance or entrepreneurs – so much of what we do is storytelling.

People often over-complicate the story.

Make it as simple and crystal clear and straightforward as possible and you will generate far more leads than anyone else.

Meaningful impact through business ventures...

We often think improving society is the role of government or non-profits.

And we've created a world for ourselves in which profit is antithetical to well-being and leaving the world a better place than the way we found it.

I've been a big proponent – and people are starting to turn their minds to this – that when it comes to leaving the world a better place, it's actually not the government that's going to make any difference.

It's the private sector…

It's the businesses that, if operated in the right way – less exploitive, less extractive and more regenerative – can really change the trajectory of our communities.

Especially in the current economic environment, its becoming obvious small to medium-sized businesses are the engine that drive our economy.

I think that's what I want to spend the rest of my life working on, whether it be through the restaurant, my law firm or the businesses that I acquire through this fund.

I want to see how each of them can work within their communities in a way that leaves those communities better than when they first started.

One book recommendation I'd make is 4,000 Weeks.

I've read it twice.

It describes productivity and time management within a certain context, and that context is, dude, you've only got 4,000 weeks to live.

It really forces you to take a step back and reprioritize and reallocate your energies in ways that make sense and align with your goals and values.

It's actually forced me to slow down a little rather than speed things up because the clock is ticking.

I encourage everyone to take a crack at it.

This week, I'm chatting with Jason Berkowitz, founder and SEO Director of Break the Web, an SEO and content marketing agency that helps in-house marketing teams make SEO "a million times less annoying."

Jason went from personal trainer to SEO expert and is a perfect example of spotting an opportunity, developing a skill, and turning it into a thriving business.

From the challenges of managing a remote team to his unconventional no-contract business model that makes agency coaches cringe, Jason shares the real ups and downs of building a boutique agency, and what it really takes to stay adaptable in a constantly changing industry.

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Break The Web Quick Stats:

🤝 Business Model: SEO & SEO-driven content marketing agency
👥 Team Size: 10 full-time employees plus contractors and freelancers
💵 Average Monthly Retainer: $5,000
🧾 Active Clients: Around 20 at any given time
⏳ Time In Business: 8 years as Break the Web (since 2017)
📱 Top Marketing Channels: Referrals/network, SEO, niche communities
📍 Structure: 100% remote team across different countries
🔄 Client Results: 200-300% average increase in non-brand organic traffic

From personal trainer to SEO expert...

I'm the founder and SEO director of Break the Web. We're an SEO and SEO-driven content marketing agency that helps in-house marketing teams make SEO just a million times less annoying.

And I actually got into SEO by accident…

I was a personal trainer in New York City that was reliant on new gym memberships to generate leads for personal training. There's only so far I could get with that for my own personal income and revenue and client list.

You know, I'd be schmoozing around with the membership consultants and maybe giving them a commission like, "Hey, send the good leads my way, I'll give you a cut."

That was helpful, but I didn't want to be solely reliant on the gym.

I'm in Tribeca, New York, one of the wealthiest areas in the country — every apartment building out here has their own gym.

Why can't I just travel within the three, four block radius with my backpack, and just train people in their gyms?

That's what started it – questions like:

How do I branch out?
How do I market myself?

I learned people are probably googling "personal trainer NYC…”

How can I get to the top?

That's what first helped my personal training business, but then I thought, "Fuck personal training. I enjoy the aspect of SEO and the challenge and the puzzle behind it a little bit more."

So that was the transition.

Personal training is interesting because you can be the best personal trainer in the world, but if you suck at sales, you're not going to have a packed schedule.

You might be the most knowledgeable, but that doesn't matter.

It was eye-opening to see people at the gym who were kind of airheads, but very charismatic – and they're solidly booked. It didn't really matter as much about the actual training as it was being a good conversationalist.

That was one thing I had to learn as a trainer first – the sales aspect, and then also the difference between marketing and sales.

Building credibility and landing the first SEO clients...

There's the first five clients and then there's the first PAYING client, because I knew I needed social proof.

I couldn't just say "I'm good at SEO" without proof to show that outside of my own personal training website.

I went to brands that I thought could use SEO work and would be an awesome case study. I said, "I'll do your SEO for free if you let me publish a case study and we'll collaborate for six months."

SEO was very different back then too – there weren't a lot of hard costs to it, and it was more "click button, get results."

I was doing that while still personal training to help build up a portfolio.

I also built up a website that ranked – I think it's still ranking really well.

I haven't touched it in years, but SEOServicesNewYork.org and ranking for New York SEO terms. That was a really good start and good social proof – the SEO agency that actually can rank themselves against other SEOs was a good value prop.

I just did a lot of that to build case studies first.

Then clients came in, some from that website…

But my first paying client was actually on Elance, which is now Upwork.

The New York site was just an SEO play.

I created what's called Exact Match Domains (EMDs) – where you get a domain that's the keyword you want to target. So, in this case, SEOServicesNewYork.org.

Building that gave good social proof and helped me get clients.

I still have one of our oldest clients who's been with us over 10 years that came in from a lead gen form on that site.

Around 2014 a lot of penalties were going around, so a big part of my business was penalty recovery because Google got more advanced.

Behind the scenes legally we were called Hyper Web Marketing, which was also a bad name.

Both names were stupid…I was an SEO guy – I didn't know anything about branding and marketing. laughs

Navigating the challenges of being a business owner...

One of the biggest differences between being a business owner is when you’re an employee, you report based on a limited set of functions you’re responsible for, but in a small business, you're wearing many hats, a lot of which you’re not that great at…

Finance kills my brain…
I suck at math…
I still count on my fingers.

I hate everything related to finance, taxes, and at the same time you still need to be responsible for that area of the business, and finding a good CPA was challenging.

When it was just me, I knew I was making profit because this was how much my direct expenses were but as we got bigger, I started bringing on VAs to help me.

SEOServicesNewYork.org was advertised as a one-person show – "you're getting the expert" – but I had VAs helping me with the various execution aspects.

Then my VAs kept dropping off…

I was thinking, "What's wrong? Why are they not sticking around?" They were getting paid decently when you look at currency rates.

Then I realized I don't know anything about being a good manager.

My New York bluntness didn't go well in other areas, so I had to learn about how to be a better communicator to people you work with.

And I remember dealing with finances – the CPA told me what he needed: "All of your expenses from the last year need categorization."

He actually gave me a warning: "I'm sorry you have to do this. Go to your bank, export all the transactions, and try to categorize them into typical P&L buckets."

That took me about a week and a half to do, like full-time.

Since that moment, I realized I'm never going to do this again – it was exhausting.

I hated money. I hated every moment of it because you start realizing like, "Did I really just spend that money six months ago on that thing and do nothing with it?"

Ever since then, I’ve outsourced it.

That was my first delegation of a bigger priority item.

Adapting to the ever-changing SEO landscape...

I think the core value for success in SEO is being able to adapt, learn, and evolve.

There are a lot of people I knew 10 years ago doing SEO that aren't anymore.

People get stubborn and fail to adapt as times change...

In the world of SEO, there's always going to be something new to learn, someone new to learn from.

For us, being able to swiftly adapt has been key.

Our philosophy has been aligning with what Google has been transparent about over the years – what they were aiming for and where they wanted to go.

If we're able to blend what we think might be working now with what might continue to be a process in the future, we wouldn't be hit with an overnight "Oh shit, we got to start from the ground up and throw away all our SOPs."

It made the transition easier.

Then of course, just the network of people you surround yourself with – being able to bounce ideas, share data in private masterminds with very small groups where we can share what's working and what's not.

The helpful content update was a brutal one and wiped a lot of people out…and what was interesting about that was it wasn't live refreshes.

If you were proactive and tried to recover, you still wouldn't see the results of all that effort until the next helpful content refresh, which I think was like a year.

It used to be that way with Google's older algorithms like Panda or Penguin.

If you had an algorithmic penalty, you would have to wait until Google decided to release an update to see the impact of your work.

Now those algorithms are kind of real-time.

Educating clients who don't understand SEO...

I'm vibe checking potential clients from the very first few minutes of the call to see how open-minded they are or what they first know.

We might say, "SEO has been around a while and you're a seasoned marketer. How would you rate your knowledge of SEO on a scale of 1 to 10?"

That gives me insights...

Some people might say, "I know the basic concepts, probably a three or a four…"

Some people might say – which makes me laugh, it's one of my pet peeves – "I know enough to be dangerous."

People who say that, you can tell right off the bat it's like an ego thing.

We also have a very interesting value proposition, a very risky value proposition as an agency.

We don't work with contracts. Every single client has a 30-day out, which is not normal in the agency world, and definitely not normal in the SEO agency world.

Expectation setting is super important and starts from the very beginning.

There was something I got years ago by a guy named Johnathan Dane who owns an agency called Klient Boost based out of California. He talked about having the client sign along with their regular MSA an ‘expectations agreement.’

It blew my mind.

He had a video called the expectations video and also written documentation stating:

"You hired us because we're the experts…

We have the process, the framework to follow, and as long as we follow that and everything is moving along the timeline we laid out, these are the results you'll expect."

Level-setting is hugely important, so we're constantly managing expectations for clients, and frame it as: we're an extension of your existing team.

Building a business with no contracts...

That started because SEO historically has had weird stigmas behind it – people promising the world and delivering nothing.

I from the very beginning had to be different...

I didn't like the idea of having to lock in a client that's not happy with the service and them have to continue paying for it.

That's the philosophy. And it's risky – business coaches hate it.

My SEO agency mentor and my regular agency mentor all keep telling me to use contracts.

Sometimes I consider a three-month contract, but during the sales process, I get a verbal or head nod agreement that "we're going to be in this for six months until you really start noticing an impact."

If they're hesitant to give that, it tells me a lot – are they expecting quick results?

The expectations are off.

It's like a gentleman's agreement or handshake agreement.

It's on us to earn your business each and every month.

We also have a timeline of execution which lays out the 12-month roadmap of what we're going to do each and every month.

This is the timeline of expectations.

Standing out in a competitive, misunderstood industry...

There are two different types of agencies in the SEO world…

You have agencies that are really awesome at delivering kick-ass results, but they suck at communication.

Then on the flip side, you have agencies that are really good at experience, kick-ass communicators, but suck at SEO.

Our goal is to bridge that gap.

Internally, what we follow is kick-ass service and kick-ass experience with two different leaders - somebody to own the outcomes, then someone else owns how the client feels.

Our philosophy is having the client's back.

Our account manager is meant to be on the client side and advocate for them, even yell at us internally if needed.

We make things as easy to understand as possible. A lot of companies will give technical jargon that's confusing and annoying, and clients just don't know what to do with it.

Things don't get done.

Clients leave and the SEO agency says "we told them what to do and they didn't do it." They just didn't understand it.

We follow a framework based on SCQA (situation, complication, question, and answer).

We have our own take on it, but it's following that structure of: here's the issue, here's why it matters, and here's how to solve it.

What makes great SEO content today...

People are forgetting that content quality is very subjective.

Depending on who's reading it, people can have very different interpretations of a single article...

I think with SEO-driven marketing, that SEO is the end goal so they create these hugely bloated articles, but we actually want to create value for our clients audience.

It reminds me of online recipes...

You want a chicken parmesan recipe, you find link, and it says "here's why my chicken parmesan recipe, which has been passed down from generation to generation, is so great."

Nobody cares…

Just tell me what ingredients I need to buy, the measurements, how long I need to bake the chicken for – just get right to it.

Avoid the fluff – it would be better for everyone: users, Google, your sanity.

Managing remote teams and leadership challenges...

The biggest internal challenge is reminding our team our core value and giving them security.

We have unlimited PTO, which comes with its own set of pros and cons from the agency side...

And reminding the team that SEO is not dead, telling them not to ignore the noise because people who are making the most noise are trying to sell something different.

At the same time, helping manage their own work-life balance and their sanity.

I'm a big believer in work-life balance, which is why that is a hill I'll die on.

I can preach all day about the pros and cons of unlimited PTO…

But at the end of the day, if people are working more than you promised they would, bringing work home with them, or waking up stressed, it’s a bad signal.

This has been a challenge I've been trying to tackle for years.

Also, I'm happy now that I have another person on my leadership team because there's always a weird dynamic between the founder and everyone else.

I might think people are transparent with me, but they're still thinking, "Oh, he's the business owner…"

But now I have someone else on the leadership team who's an employee, saying the same things, and that helps.

I've had a lot of direct reports and I would always ask during one-on-ones, "What is something I can do to better support you?"

And it became a running joke because I would never get anything from anybody.

But then she starts doing these one-on-ones and gets all sorts of feedback about me, and how I could be a better leader.

And I'm not mad.

I can put my ego aside and know where I can improve.

It’s actually great, because it's a whole different feedback loop and set of insights.

That opened up a whole new world and reminded me people might not feel comfortable truly being transparent with me.

If they say they have a problem, they might fear "Am I going to get fired?" – which is not going to happen – but having someone else on their side to speak to has been helpful.

Effective lead generation for an SEO agency...

We're an SEO agency that does SEO for ourselves.

Just a month ago, we made Break the Web a client of Break the Web.

Our team had opened up some bandwidth, so now the leadership team is the client. We're seeing things from a whole new perspective...

Our own SEO rankings are mostly super top-of-the-funnel informational, but we do have some more bottom-of-the-funnel queries for specific services.

We get a lot of mixed leads in terms of quality.

I think referrals and our network still continues to be on top.

We connect with other agencies that have complementary services.

We only do SEO but we can partner with agencies and give 10% referral fees, which has been great.

And then even just asking clients if they know anybody that they feel like they can get a referral from.

If they're more budget-conscious, we might say, "For the next three months we can take 10% off of your budget if you happen to know anybody."

They'll look like the hero too – "Break the Web's giving us a 10% discount."

I do a lot of LinkedIn content, but my intention there is not lead gen…

It's thought leadership, social proof, or backing up when people are going to do their due diligence.

The value of mentorship and learning...

It's a shortcut really.

Especially for entrepreneurs.

From the very beginning I've had mentors.

When I started, I had no money for SEO education programs, so I reached out to people I thought would be awesome to work with.

I just emailed them and said, "I got no money for your training program or one-on-one, but I am a trainer. I know SEOs sit in front of the computer all day and it's hard with family balance. Would you be open to a value exchange? I can help get you healthy, maybe some people in your family, write out nutrition programs, things you can do at home, just for some time."

I read Influence, the Power of Persuasion as a teenager.

He talks about the power of reciprocation. So even when I didn't have money for a mentor, I would aim to reciprocate with value.

That's how I learned about SEO much quicker than if I'd done trial and error.

Every education course is different and might have conflicting information, but mentors help set a good standard. As I got older and priorities changed, my mindset shifted, and I started bringing in different mentors for different things.

I met my current agency mentor Frank Cowell through a HubSpot webinar years ago. He talked about the ups and downs, about having the full aspect of things as a leader.

Like it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Shit gets hard.
Shit gets confusing.

There's going to be days where you're like, "Fuck it. I'm out. I'm going to get a full-time job."

I resonated with what he said, I hit him up, and he's still my coach today.

If starting over today...

I think I would delegate more earlier.

There's a lot of material out there about the art of delegation because it really is an art.

I'm pretty happy with the process I've followed but very early on, I would sit in Starbucks just hustling from open to close and I know I could have taken a break and gotten more done if I had delegated things sooner.

Moments of doubt and wanting to quit...

Last week! laughs

I mean, there's times I'm just trying to manage my own stress levels with work-life balance.

I'm thinking, "Why am I taking on so much responsibility?"

Then you also have the pressure of the team...

At the end of the day if you're the sole owner – can I match my income getting a full-time job?

I don't know if I can, but I definitely can't match my freedom.

So it's like the pro and con.

But there was a time years ago, around 2018, when one client was largely responsible for most of our revenue.

If that client leaves, then you're like, "Holy crap!"

Forget my employees – what about me?

I was living in New York at the time, so even just my own rent and cost of living – it was very existential.

I approached other full-service agencies in New York City, met with them in person, and just told them the situation I was in.

I said, "I'm really good at SEO. I know SEO is a small little line item. Is it worth opening a discussion about an acquisition?"

That was probably the low, low point. But battling through that was probably the best thing.

There are highs and lows in being an entrepreneur.

People only see the highs because thats all anyone shares, especially if they have something to sell.

But really, it's an emotional roller coaster.

The highs are so fucking awesome when things go great.

But then the lows are so low and dark.

And if you're a solo founder too, you might be the only one experiencing that low, which is even harder.

There have been low points, but it was just getting back to that entrepreneurial spirit.

People who are backed into a corner get their best shit done.

Sometimes over the years, these same moments keep coming where your best work comes out when you're in that corner and hustle mode activates.

I had to get more business, and dug deep, getting back into cold calling, which I hate.

But I created a script, approached it systematically and started again from the basics.

I'm a New Yorker, so I've had a job since I was 13. I know what hustle is like. I know what hard work is like.

And it's like, alright, it's time to hustle.

Perseverance is a big trait of a good entrepreneur.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

We’re a little behind schedule, but here it is for Q1 2025.

Growth…

Interestingly, we’ve maintained an 11.3% growth rate in readers, even though my marketing efforts took a bit of a back seat to competing priorities.

LinkedIn and social posts have historically been strong growth drivers — but between juggling client projects and, well, life — I haven’t been as consistent as I’d like.

That’s definitely an area to refocus on in Q2 — not just to grow the publication, but because I want to give maximum exposure to every guest who generously shares their story.

Luckily, I spent a good chunk of late 2024 setting up referral partnerships with other Substack publications, and those have continued to quietly deliver.

At this point, they’ve become our strongest attribution channel by far.

And even with all that, we’ve maintained a 55%+ open rate, which blows me away.

So thank you — seriously — for being such an engaged, thoughtful community.

The Come Up IRL

The most exciting update this quarter was hosting the first (and second) in-person event for The Come Up — a private room dinner at Mimi Chinese in Toronto, and another at Bar St. Lo.

I’ve always done this kind of thing informally over the years, but it felt right to officially put it under the banner. We brought together 12 business owners and operators ranging from real estate developers to agency leads to eCommerce founders to meet, help each other out, and trade stories.

From the beginning, The Come Up has tried to carry an ethos of honesty, and normalize the idea that building a business is hard, and we should probably stop pretending it’s not.

Not to make it sound impossible, but to admit tell the truth — the good and the bad — to highlight what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what we’re still figuring out.

More and more readers have told me that a lot of entrepreneurship content just stresses them out — especially when it makes things look effortless.

That feedback’s really stuck with me, so it felt like a natural next step to bring some of those people together in real life to talk shop, trade tactics, and swap war stories.

Half the battle of entrepreneurship is mental — and nothing helps more than being around people who truly get it.

If you want to come to one of these dinners, shoot me a message and I’ll add you to the invite list.

Analog Forever…

If you know me, you know I’m big on doing everything you can (including paying money) to reduce screen time, and getting offline to clarify thoughts. This is something that isn’t just a personal preference but is backed by science to improve clarity and creativity.

As a result, for years, I’ve written everything down in moleskine notebooks and gone for meandering walks through the city, giving myself time to think about what to focus on net, before re-entering the matrix to execute.

Finally, I decided instead of shelling out $50 a pop at Indigo, I may as well just produce my own, so I partnered with my friend Laura from Hand&Press to produce our very own notebooks for The Come Up.

I wouldn’t call this our first piece of official merch — more like I just ordered 50 notebooks to last me the next five years, then realized I probably don’t actually need 50 notebooks.

If you’d like one, shoot me a message.

There’s no ecommerce set up yet, but tariffs be damned we’re happy to ship across both Canada and the US.

With that said…if you have any feedback on how we can improve our content please let me know.

You can always respond to this newsletter or reach out to me directly!

Thank you for being part of this journey — your support and feedback mean everything.

Keep building!

Share The Come Up

This week, we're featuring Sadie Renee, the co-founder of The Usual Company, a specialized agency helping food and beverage brands with go-to-market strategies, particularly in the coffee and food service space.

We got into how her experience as VP of Oatly's Coffee Channel shaped her approach to partnerships, why baristas are secretly influencing food culture, and how she balances being a "die-hard realist" with her co-founder's "eternal optimist" mindset.

If you're running an agency, navigating the challenges of year one in business, or interested in the untapped potential of B2B partnerships, you'll find plenty of insights here.

Dive in below!

The Usual Company Quick Stats:

📅 Time in Business: 1 Year
👥 Number of Clients: 8
💀 Times She Almost Quit: Innumerable
🚀 Businesses Started Prior: 1

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Background and experience...

Years ago, I started in a variety of hospitality positions, a lot of behind-the-barista work, and then moved into marketing and engagement strategy for cafés and other food and beverage brands.

I scaled a consumer-facing coffee crawl concept with a midwest marketing agency, The LAB, for several years, and had a lot of fun doing that. I also managed event logistics there, and built out a pretty robust sponsorship program tailored to the culture and business scene in each of those markets. I’m so grateful for everything I learned during that phase of my career - so many connections, so much skill building.

I started working for Oatly as their Pacific Northwest Market development manager in 2017. I was really lucky to work on a lot of different projects there.

I helped with the go-to-market strategy for their frozen dessert line and then came back to the coffee and food service side of things to build out their distribution network. I did a lot of sales and infrastructure management as we scaled, and got to work with so many talented people.

Ace Bertin helped immensely with that build, and joined The Usual as a Strategist not long after we launched.

My last role there was vice president of the Coffee Channel…

I took over that role from The Usual Company's co-founder, Bryan Harmer Hasho. He was actually employee number one in the US at Oatly. We had a wonderful time building up the Coffee Channel there together - never a dull moment.

Explanation of "the Coffee Channel"...

The 'Coffee Channel' was a novel thing during our time at Oatly.

Most CPG companies that have some sort of B2B strategy focus predominantly on retail — sometimes food service. We took a really unique approach to what most companies would consider food service, and were able to connect with a lot of barista communities.

I think the barista role has always been really influential, sometimes in a really overlooked way. There's been this rise of what's known as 'third wave' specialty coffee. Baristas really gave a platform to the care, dedication and craft of the drink, the sourcing of the coffee, and to the other ingredients that were being used.

That hadn't really been seen before, the kind of experience elevation you'd expect at high end cocktail bars or Michelin-starred restaurants — places that genuinely elevated the coffee drinking experience and highlighted how wonderful coffee can be.

With Oatly, we had baristas that were really excited about the product itself and promoting it, which was a really influential part of oat milk's success. The brand showed up in those markets in really authentic ways that supported localized barista communities.

Typically, you'll find that some of the best baristas in the city are good friends with the best bartenders in the city — or with the best chefs in the city. Even though they're not getting credit for it, baristas actually play a huge role in the culture of the food and beverage scene.

So, by focusing on those businesses and those communities as the first go to market point of activation, we were able to kind of open up a new channel, so to speak. I think that was a really unique way to open the market for a new product that shifted the alternative milk and dairy consumption category pretty significantly.

The jump from employment to entrepreneurship...

I think from our earliest days collaborating at Oatly, Bryan and I had a lot of work flow compatibility. We were both able to see things the other didn't, and provide good feedback loops for each other.

Our time at Oatly was so transformative. Bryan had a very diverse rise through the food and beverage world. He ran his own chain of coffee shops for a while. He's worked at a number of really interesting food and beverage establishments.

When we started, Oatly was a much different company than where we ended. And that is a standard marker for success in the corporate world — for a company to shift and evolve.

We felt like we had done really good work there, and were ready to take what we had learned to the next level: into the broader food and beverage space.

We were so incredibly lucky to work with so many amazing, talented, thoughtful, and kind humans during our time at Oatly, so much so that we left with such a strong network of industry folks, potential clients, potential customers, and industry influencers that were looking for ways to help drive the industry forward.

So — it was actually a really positive experience to be able to tap into some of those connections and build on the connections we already had.

It meant we had clients interested right off the bat, and we've been able to continue building on that throughout our first year.

As for the differences between reating self-imposed business goals feel different from corporate-mandated goals — it's pretty new for me.

Every job I've ever had, I always try to show up 110%, and be the best I can possibly be. One of the biggest lessons I learned Oatly is that there are so many things outside of your control. When I'm in a leadership position or if I'm working for someone in a leadership position, I take the responsibility that comes with that power really seriously, sometimes to a fault — because I'm often working hard to direct an outcome on something I don't always actually have the proper control over.

Since starting my own company, I've really tried to just control the ‘controllables.’

It's so cliche, but it's true.

I've learned a lot this year about how to balance my own workload and client expectations, and I want to continue doing that.

Niching down...

Go to market strategy and brand positioning are two of our top services offered — in the coffee and foodservice space, specifically.

For a lot of brands that have a consumer product, B2B partnerships often go unattended to or unnoticed. It has so much potential for really high marketing ROI, because it's typically a lower cost than flashy B2C campaigns or retail advertising or promotions. The power of B2B partnerships is something that we've always believed in and aim to help our clients maximize.

We offer a variety of customizable services as well, depending on the client and what they need. That might be consulting on any number of internal projects – with Bryan's background in innovation, we have a lot to offer on the product R&D side when it's coffee industry or foodservice industry specific.

We also work with companies who are at a variety of stages. For brands that are just starting out and have a product that has some promise but they don't have a lot of product market fit confirmed yet or they're not really sure where to start, we are often very useful to them, as well as companies who have built out their business in the retail space or on the D2C side and are recognizing how much potential the B2B side of things really holds.

We're able to come in at that point and help connect some of the dots.

We offer a variety of sales and marketing services that can be custom fit as well, like sales representation. We left Oatly with a large network of distribution contacts across North America and those are often local distributors that service the local food and beverage communities that I was speaking about earlier. Being able to continue building within that network holds a lot of generative power, so we find a lot of value for brands that we're representing in those spaces by plugging them into those channels.

Determining ICP…

My number one filter to gauge if a potential client is right for us tends to be this question: does this company or this idea have something useful to offer the industry? Obviously, that can be interpreted really broadly, but I'll give you an example:

Ghost Town Oats is a company that was founded by baristas. It's Black and queer-owned, and they started up in 2020 largely as a response to the influx of oat milk companies that weren't positioned for marginalized communities or parts of the consumer market that weren't as mainstream.

We've started working with them over the last couple of months, and I'm really excited to see how much community-level impact they have. Their model of community ownership has already been really powerful in catalyzing a lot of the barista attention that played a role in the rise of oat milk generally, and now feels like they have a brand that is made for the barista community, specifically.

Given what they're doing — how novel it is, and the kind of impact it can have — they're a really good example of the kind of client that we're looking to support and grow with.

Dividing work in a partnership and client challenges...

We've worked together for more than eight years now, so I think we have a really good understanding of each other's strengths and growth opportunities. Still — we've learned a lot this year, because it's very different operating as business partners when you're used to being co-workers.

I think we are still figuring a lot out, but we've had success in each of us leaning into our strengths.

We have a much clearer picture of what each of us can do very well, and are getting better at outsourcing the stuff that neither one of us is good at. I do think there's always value in improving your skills in areas that you don't excel in, but there's also a point where you kind of have to say,

“You know what? This is not my bag, and I need to focus on where I can be the most valuable and figure out what that means for other skill set areas that need to.”

I think I'm more detail oriented, so I take on a lot of the client admin management work.

He has an economics degree, so he comes in really handy on the accounting/finance side of things.

He's also an eternal optimist and I'm a die hard realist.

If shit really hits the fan, I'm always the one that's like, this is the end…

We have to recalibrate everything.

He's always much more level headed in those situations, so that's always a good counterbalance for me.

I think client sales expectations are a good example, too. His optimism is so useful for exploring things that other people would never consider possible. A lot of the success that we had at Oatly and a lot of the success that he had in his other roles at other companies is because of that optimism, and I think it's an incredibly valuable asset.

I will often come in with the cold, hard downside so that clients have a view into their best case scenario and their worst case scenario. Usually, it lands somewhere in the middle, and we've found that combo actually works really well.

I think it's important that you're not painting too rosy of a picture where there's client expectations involved. I always lean a little bit too pessimistic and that's not a good client communication approach either. So I think we have struck a really good balance this year on combining forces in that way and managing client expectations for the unknowns.

Client churn and challenges...

We've had two separate clients that have had quite large pivotal circumstances. With one, a regulatory change occurred two weeks into the contract — something totally outside of everyone's control.

From my perspective, the right thing to do in those scenarios is to try your best to show up as the most supportive partner you can be, given the circumstances. That's how I view client work. I'm coming on board as a partner — maybe just within specific parameters — but the goal is always to be providing support to them.

I think watching something that you've had a hand in building go in a difficult direction is always pretty painful.

But, it's just a part of life.

I always try to find specific lessons from those experiences and incorporate them into our operation.

I feel like that's a very cliche thing to say, but it's 100% true.

Even if it's external circumstances — economic pressures, political changes, etc. — there's always a lesson in there somewhere.

Even if it's a very small one.

And while we haven't had too many major issues to date, we had one client where the whole company folded and we lost a ton of money — and in the day-to-day of things being uncertain and client changes — navigating all of it can be overwhelming, so the idea that things may not work out really comes from just general overwhelm rather than a logical "oh this isn't going to work."

We've been in a lot of conversations with clients and prospective clients where the deliverable they're looking for is XYZ, and either the decision makers don't have an understanding of all the factors that need to come together to see that success happen, or there's just a misalignment in vision or how to execute.

For agencies, I think that's a really difficult line to walk — needing your bills paid, but upholding your integrity — but I really want to make sure that the clients I'm working with are in alignment on how we get things done, because that is ultimately where the success of the relationship lies.

Service changes forecasted for year two...

Year one has been so diverse — but we still have a lot of exciting work to do on systematizing some of those packaged offerings.

I've been tinkering with a brand ambassador structure for a couple clients.

It's been interesting to watch the rise of influencer stuff with other consumer companies — where they're offering affiliate links and that sort of thing. I would love to live in a world with better freelance compensation models for baristas who bring brands into their sphere of influence, so that's something we're working towards.

It's high ROI for the brand, so that's something that I think has a lot of potential to scale in a much bigger way for a number of our clients.

For some of our sales execution clients, we'll custom build a field team based on their goals and the kinds of industry connections that we have. I'm working on other ways to make that kind of model more accessible to brands that are just starting up and don't have the capital to invest in something at that scale yet.

Goal in 2025...

I think client work is always first and foremost with any agency.

That's definitely been true for us.

In 2024, I found myself deprioritizing our own marketing initiatives time and again in service of marketing initiatives for the brands that we're working with.

Generally, I feel that the success of an agency is a reflection of the client success that it services. I felt pretty good about that ramp so far this year.

I think taking a more visible position in the coffee and foodservice space and having more direct brand interaction with the folks who are driving the next wave of change is really important.

The coffee industry in particular has had a difficult time coming back from pandemic challenges like staffing and turnover, but I still believe the industry holds a lot of transformative and generative power to affect positive change in the broader food and beverage space.

I'd say that's probably the biggest goal: making sure we are connected with and serving as a resource to the folks that are making meaningful strides in driving change in the industry.

Business goals and challenges ahead...

I think the biggest goal I have specifically is maintaining a sustainable pace.

We have a lot of projects launching that I'm really excited about, and I'm an overachiever by nature, so my approach is always to put in 150% and ride the adrenaline until it dries up.

That's a hard lesson to learn when it doesn't work, and I'm currently learning it.

So, with that being the case, I think it’s all about finding reasonable ways to pace out those projects while managing cash flow implications, client pipeline implications, subcontractor team bandwidth, and our own bandwidth.

It can feel like a very precarious puzzle, but I think sustainable pacing is probably my number one personal goal so that I have the time to personally recharge and not burn out.

Honestly, we have so many client projects and inbound clients that I am so excited about, and that I think have a ton of potential to be really impactful. But, with that, you have all the boring stuff on the back end that has to be taken care of.

Managing subcontractor paperwork, cash flow, and all the other realities of running a business while also finding time to recharge is the classic challenge, and we're experiencing it.

I also think there's a lot of unknowns for the food and beverage industry specifically.

The way we eat has undergone so many shifts — a lot of them for the worse — in the last couple of decades, and that's kind of why we do this.

We would love to see the food system move into a more sustainable place, climate-wise, human-health-wise. I think there's so, so many things that need to be addressed there, and there's a lot of reasons to have hope, but, balancing those goals in the day-to-day and helping clients who also have that as part of their company vision is tough.

Balancing all of those pieces is what I feel will be our biggest challenge in 2025.

Long term vision...

As someone who measures results on outcomes — I'm very data driven — I have learned to embrace the fact that I'm not really sure where it will go. There are a lot of different directions that The Usual Company could go, but given that the reason we're doing this is so embedded in affecting positive change in the food and beverage space, there are so many ways it could evolve.

That's been another hard lesson for me, personally: learning to hold onto those possible outcomes a little bit more loosely instead of fixating on one specific direction. I know that's counter to how a lot of people might build a business, but it's working for us so far, so we're gonna continue to follow these different threads as we go, as opposed to being locked into one outcome.

Resources that have helped the business...

Social media is the best tool we use — not because we're using social media to promote what we do (we could certainly be better at that!), but because it's a great window into what's happening in the industry.

I think it is incredible that I can sit in my home in New York and understand at a really granular level what's happening in the restaurant scene in Los Angeles, in Seattle, or Kansas City — so I lean on that really heavily.

Also, it comes with a powerful ability to actually connect with people. Email is one thing, but when I'm shooting them an Instagram message, I think it's a bit more personal.

Don't get me wrong, there are so many things I hate about social media, but it is really powerful as a business tool.

Notion — huge shout out to Notion. We run so much of the brain of our company, and all of our task management and a lot of our client activation and planning work in Notion. Huge fan.

I'm absolutely a Google user. No Microsoft for me — I love the G suite.

But the other thing that comes to mind are people. That's also kind of a cliche answer, but our relationships are the whole business. The thing that makes our industry so special and powerful is the relationships.

I see so many people go into business with strangers and I think that is so incredibly brave. Hats off to them, because it's a lot harder that way. Being able to lean on my network for insights and support has made all the difference.

On self-doubt and work-life balance...

I think I carry a somewhat irrational fear of things not working out.

I'm a die hard realist and a pessimist at times.

And while we haven't had too many major issues to date, we had one client where the whole company folded and we lost a ton of money — and in the day-to-day of things being uncertain and client changes — navigating all of it can be overwhelming, so the idea that things may not work out really comes from just general overwhelm rather than a logical "oh this isn't going to work."

I want things to be done really well.
I want the company to succeed.
I want my clients to succeed.

And we have so many signs that we're on the right path, that things are going the way they're supposed to.

I try to think about the bigger picture and this is something Bryan's much better at than me.

The other thing I'll say about him is he loves home run swings.

He's always looking for the bigger win, even if it's a little tougher to get there.

He said something really early on in our partnership on work life balance:

I will view my life as having had good work-life balance, even if I have a period where I'm just working non stop and then I have a period where I'm really not working much at all versus every 24 hour period or every week needing to be really balanced.

And I think that's more of the approach that we take as well.

We're okay with things being incredibly dynamic and hectic, if it's followed by a period of recalibration – that approach means we can ebb and flow with client needs and the realities of life with more ease.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

This week, we're chatting with Juliana Casale — a tech marketer turned sparkling water mogul who created Balloon, a premium sparkling water brand with real ingredients and real sugar (just a touch!).

From driving her favorite American brands across the border to building a passionate community on LinkedIn, Juliana opens up about navigating manufacturing hurdles, the reality of early-stage CPG economics, and finding joy in the journey despite having "no business being a CPG founder."

If you've been wondering what it's like to bootstrap a physical product business while paying your mortgage, this one’s for you.

Dive in below!

Balloon Quick Stats:

🥤 Business Model: Premium sparkling water brand (CPG)
💰 Annual Revenue: $15,000
🛍️ Retail Locations: 6 stores
📊 SKUs: 3 flavors (4th & 5th coming soon)
👤 Team Size: 1 (solo founder + freelancers)
⏳ Time In Business: ~1.5 years since pre-orders (Oct 2023)
💸 Funding: Self-funded (bootstrapped)
👩‍💻 Background: Tech marketing

The tech marketer who became a beverage founder...

I have no business being a CPG founder – I've been a tech marketer my entire career. It's all been digital products, in the cloud, so to speak...

I've done all sorts of marketing for B2B SaaS – blog posts, ebooks, landing pages, website copy – just very digital.

It's not like I decided one day to be a CPG founder, it's just all these moments in my life that finally added up, but the first reason I did this is I've been a sparkling water fan for a very long time. I'm one of those nerds who sees a new brand, sees a new flavor, has to have it.

I'm part of a Facebook group of thousands of fizzy drinks fans where we all compare notes. "Oh my gosh, LaCroix just came out with this Sunflower flavor" or "Polar just dropped a new seasonal line."

There's this natural affinity people have – you either are one of those people, or you know someone who is. When they love it, they really love it.

I'm not doing this because I think it's a hot category with a giant total addressable market that's on the up and up. I wanted to do it because I love it, and I feel if you're not passionate about the category you're in, it's going to be really hard to stay motivated.

If it was just dollars being dangled in my face, maybe it'd be a different story.

But I'm doing this because I love it, and I hope that comes across when I talk about it.

Second, I moved to Canada from the U.S.

All of a sudden all the brands I was used to – Hal's New York, Polar, Nixie, Waterloo, Target brand, Trader Joe's brand – I couldn't find any of it.

It felt like I'd moved to a seltzer wasteland.

I'd go home to Boston, go to a bunch of grocery stores, and then have to lug a 60-pound suitcase on the subway. That's the level of commitment I had.

Third, I was marketing at two different companies where the target audience was e-commerce founders. In both cases, my job was to network and be in the community of founders to understand their pain points.

My LinkedIn feed got invaded by these founders, and I just got to hear their stories – it was super inspiring.

One thing that stood out was a lot of them didn't have CPG backgrounds or MBAs. They just had an idea, were passionate about it, followed up on it, made it happen, were super persistent, and just kept pushing until they reached success.

In the back of my head, a seed of thought formed: "Oh, this is possible for people who aren't 'qualified' to do it."

The last kicker was going through my fourth tech layoff…

One of the last projects I worked on before being let go was creating a fake Shopify brand to see how our app integrated with Shopify. I picked a sparkling water brand and named it Balloon.

Then suddenly I had free time, severance, and a fake Shopify store.

I thought, "I could try to jump into my next tech job, or I could take a minute and try to build this and see if I can actually make it happen."

I was just tired of being everybody else's employee. So I started doing some freelance marketing to keep income coming in. Then I started building the brand – it was an idea in a notebook, then a spreadsheet, then me talking to other founders asking pretty dumb questions...

Then it was doing a pre-order campaign with friends and family, lining up the designer for the cans, finding a co-manufacturer, figuring out how to fulfill orders from a Shopify store.

Then launching in Canada, then the US, and now retail stores.

I kept saying, "How far can I take this?" And the answer was always, "To this next step."

I never set out to be a CPG founder – I never thought it was a path I would take. I just love the product and love people's reactions when they try it. It validates that maybe I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

I have no idea what I'm doing. But that's kind of the fun part too – just figuring it out.

It's crazy to me that I spent a year getting it made into a can, and now I have to spend maybe the rest of my life trying to sell it.

Finding production partners when you're still tiny...

Pretty early on I joined Suzie Yorke’s Founders Helping Founders WhatsApp chat. It's an incredible resource – if you search for literally any term in CPG, someone's talked about packaging sources, how to get a UPC code, which grocery store chains are friendly to local business. There's so much in there.

I think I probably asked, "Who does small batch co-manufacturing?"

A lot of it was just asking questions.

There's also the Startup CPG Slack Group, another free resource. You just sign up and there are all these channels where people can ask questions.

One challenge is that so much of the resources for CPG are US-based. But it kind of makes it easier to find Canadian resources because there's so little – it's not like you have a million co-manufacturers to choose from. But in a funny way, the less choice you have, the easier it is to make decisions or try something.

I researched maybe eight co-manufacturers, and ended up working with Lost Craft Brewery in the Junction. I was actually their first contract project – they had never done it before.

It was so manual – I had all the ingredients in the can shipped to their production facility. The head brewer mixed it in the tank, and then he was just feeding cans into the canning machine. He was just feeding cans into the canning machine. It was a very small production, but perfect for me because they were like, "We'll do a thousand cans per SKU."

That was enough inventory for the first six months of my business because I didn't have much demand yet. I could store it in my house – my husband wasn't thrilled, but it was in our basement and garage, and I could fulfill all the orders myself.

It was the perfect fit for what I needed.

The people in my fizzy drinks Facebook group were my first customer surveys about what flavors they wanted, and my friends and family were the first to find out I was doing this.

Every month I'd give them an update – they were my stakeholders.

It was a lot of research, a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of talking to someone who would refer me to someone else who could answer any question.

And I think what's great about not having an ego is that's basically my whole vibe – I'm not afraid to look stupid, ask questions, or approach people who are way above my success level.

The CPG community is amazing — everyone's so willing to help each other because it's so hard, and no one's going to succeed without assistance.

It's literally a matter of being comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and asking someone who's "accomplished" for their help.

Balancing freelance work with building a brand...

I'm in a weird middle ground where half my time is freelance marketing for other companies. I do consulting for content marketing at a Shopify agency and have a portfolio of e-commerce brands that I do ad and email copy for, so I have a steady trickle of income that I can use toward Balloon.

I don't really track every dollar in/dollar out — it's more like, "I'm going to spend $4,000 to get the cans made, then $5,000 to rebrand because I'm panicking that it looks like Bubly, then $3,000 at this trade show..."

Then I'll spend whatever on warehousing and logistics once I make a bigger batch.

I see how much money I have in the bank account and know how much I can spend. Once I hit a steady situation with a co-manufacturer, ingredients costs, can costs, and retail sales, I'll have more formal forecasting, but it's been experimental so far.

It's kind of like, "Let's just try this, go to the next stage, go to the next stage."

My husband has a lot of data analysis in his background, which has been a godsend.

He's a cancer research scientist, so his whole life is spreadsheets and numbers.

He did force me to sit down and plug in all my expenses so he could say, "Your cost per can is this…" That's been invaluable for figuring out how much to sell to retail stores.

If I didn't know the cost of goods, it would be almost impossible to figure out because I'm not a data person.

I know my costs for flavor essences, cans, production with the co-manufacturer... Then there's the one-off cost of batches, the monthly subscription fee for Shopify and other apps, and variable shipping costs.

Someone makes an order from the US, that's one cost…

Someone orders it to Ottawa, that's different…

There are all these costs that are completely variable – some recurring, some one-off. I don't know how anyone arrives at a real number because there are so many factors.

And the exchange rate fluctuates daily, so cost of goods versus profits can widely vary too.

Thank God I have a husband who says, "Just give me everything you've ever paid for and I'll give you a number." *laughs*

The marketing expert who can't do all the marketing...

As a marketer, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I also know what I have time for.

Because I'm doing this all by myself, it hurts because I'm like, "I should be building abandoned checkout email flows in Klaviyo…I should be posting to TikTok."

I have this list in my head that's a mile long of best practices, but I don't have the time to follow through on them, so I have the bare minimum in a lot of categories.

Even just switching to LinkedIn as my primary organic marketing channel meant I've abandoned the email rapport I had built with my audience before.

I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I don't really have the time to do it myself.

I've gotten to the point now where I know I need to get help. I've been very fiercely a solo founder, but you can only get by so long doing everything. I just onboarded a social media person, because that's one giant, glaring hole that has been hurting me the most.

I used to post pretty regularly on Instagram, then it was dead silent for over a month…

Recognizing I'm not the person to be the social media manager, I found someone who very kindly offered to help me.

She gave me this amazing pitch deck, saying "I really want to work for your brand. Here's what I would do." I was like, "Yes, start tomorrow. Here are the passwords. Go nuts."

She's Gen Z, so I'm like, "You're native to the channel. I have no idea what I'm doing – I'm 41 – so please go at it."

I just need help on all the logistics and supply too – that's just not my area, and it's so complicated. I know I'm doing it wrong and am paying way too much for shipping anywhere.

I have flat rates on my Shopify store, and every time a large order comes in, I'm taking a hit.

I'm working with an incredible ops consultant named Steve Dontigny who's helped scale carbonated beverages in Canada. His company The Forge helps CPG brands get supply costs down, find the right co-manufacturer, negotiate contracts and connect with distributors. He's been a total game changer for me by handling a ton of the infrastructure stuff that I just don't have the time or knowledge to tackle.

I'm sure I could figure out whatever it is, but it's going to take so much longer, so the shortcut is working with experts.

What's been great is because I've been so upfront with my story and confessional in all my LinkedIn posts, people want to help in a way that's almost too good to be true.

People are reaching out saying, "How can I support?" And I'm like, "What's the catch here?"

Navigating e-commerce vs. retail...

I think the 2010s were the heyday of strictly direct-to-consumer brands – "I'm going to build a brand online, it's going to be online only." But the more I have sales online, the more I realize the cost for shipping heavy cans of sparkling water is destroying me.

Maybe a 3PL situation would make sense financially, but right now it doesn't – I haven't explored that avenue. E-commerce served a great purpose for getting prototypes out there so people could give feedback. It's been really good for having a digital business card. But it's a nut I haven't cracked in terms of profitability.

If I could get shipping costs down, it would probably be worth continuing to invest. But when you look at the costs, D2C is already too expensive if it's over $2 a can.

But at retail, people don't bat an eyelash if they're at a cafe or bakeshop spending $3.50-$4 on a can, because they're already in a high-end situation where a mocha is $7.

It positions the product in a way where people are less price sensitive.

I am pretty staunchly against going with grocery store conglomerates, at least for a long time.

You hear about so much complexity with brokers and distributors, and then there's all these fees and free fill and chargebacks.

I can see why people do it – obviously, the more production and inventory there's demand for, the cost per unit goes down and you're more profitable. But there's so much more you have to deal with at that level of production. I'm very hesitant, and I don't have investors or anyone breathing down my neck to scale fast.

There's no reason to scale fast aside from ego.

I think the flip side is I can take my time and be very thoughtful about where I'm showing up. I don't see a reason why not to focus on coffee shops, health food stores, yoga studios, or cold plunge places – where people spend a bunch of money and are less price sensitive.

I feel like once I'm in a giant retail situation like Sobeys or Loblaws, then I'm up against the $0.40 a can conglomerates like Bubly and Perrier, and it's harder to justify the cost. I'm just trying to be super mindful about what makes sense.

The surprising economics of sparkling water...

I think no consumer understands this. I used to be the consumer who was like, "How can you charge $3.50 for a can of water with a little bit of ingredients in it? That's insane!"

But because I've been so small batch, I'm paying a lot per can to make it – I think my cost of goods is like $1.35.

That's because I worked with someone who was literally hand-feeding cans into a machine.

The cost of labor is very high because my minimum order quantity for the cans to be printed and the ingredients to be shipped was very low. Once you reach a certain scale of production and ingredients, you get price breaks.

So if it's $1.35 for me to produce a can, then you look at the shipping costs for direct-to-consumer, I have to drive down the cost as much as possible for the product because the shipping is so expensive.

But I also have to make it worth my while to sell it.

If I'm looking at $1.35 per can, I'm trying to get it to $2 a can or less for ordering online.

With retail, if I sell it to them for $2, then they add a dollar to cover their overhead and it's $3…

It gets really high up there pretty fast.

It’s not up to me what retailers mark it up to – I provide the suggested retail price, but they can charge whatever they need or want to.

What's good though is there's a lot of opportunity to cut my costs. I've been paying so much per can, but as soon as I scale up, I'm going to save probably 25-50 cents pretty easily. I can either translate that cost to the consumer and drive down my costs, or have the extra buffer.

That's just the really easy math.

If I had a broker and a distributor, I've heard the broker wants like 5%, the distributor wants 40%.

I'm coming from a pretty pure place where I'm literally the one dropping off cases at stores, but as I scale up, there will be middlemen and more middlemen, and it's going to get insane.

At that point, I don't know how anyone makes money, because it's like you scale and then that scale helps drive your costs down. But at the same time, the scale necessitates having the broker, the distributor, warehouse, and fulfillment team.

Building a brand with a unique approach...

When I got into the R&D process, I thought, "I have to compete with the AHAs, the Perriers, the Bublys – zero calories, zero sugar." Then my husband was with me at the tastings and said,

"Devil's advocate: why don't we put real sugar in this? Like, a few grams?"

Then it tasted really great.

I was like, "Wait a minute. There's almost nothing in between the zero calories, zero sugar and the sodas." There's a few with some juice, or maple sweetener, but there's really not much in the middle.

Giving people something that tastes more like a soda but isn't a soda, and isn't functional (it's not trying to do anything with your gut or your head) – there's nothing in it aside from clean ingredients.

Just something that tastes good.

This is great for social events, for pregnant women who don't have to Google the ingredients, for kids because it's got low sugar (not as much as a juice box).

I want to see it at music festivals, in vending machines replacing soda as a hydration option that tastes good, at Porter Airlines, at concerts, at parties where people are celebrating.

It's called Balloon for a reason – I want it to be part of happy occasions.

I think there's a lot of room for building excitement and vibrancy around that. It could be a very good social drink.

My husband's a scientist, and he went on a rant: "People literally need sugar to live. Sugar is not bad – having a lot of sugar is bad."

I was like, "Yeah, why are people tying themselves into knots to avoid sugar?"

And some studies show whatever sweetener is in Diet Coke is a neurotoxin. I get tricked into drinking these fake sweetener drinks – I don't look at the label and it says zero sugar.

And then I drink it and I'm like, "What is this?"

A different kind of success measure...

I didn't set out to be a successful business.

I didn't pick this category because I think there's a giant opportunity for the next billion-dollar acquisition.

I'm doing this because I want to learn, I think it's fun, I love the category, and I just want to see how far I can take it.

My goal for this year is simply "get into retail."

It's not about X amount of cans or X amount of dollars in orders. I SHOULD do that as a business owner, but it's literally just "how many retail stores can I get into before I maybe qualify for a distributor that can then get me into something like Sobey's Local program?"

I think as I become bigger, have more demand, and need to button myself up – maybe make an informal board of advisors – I'll get to the stage where I have actual financial goals or milestones. But because I'm so early on and I've only been doing this for a year and some change, I'm just asking, "What's the next natural step the company should take?"

On being a solo founder...

Maybe having a co-founder would have been better…

I feel like so many companies that do well have co-founders. You've got twice the amount of brainpower, accountability, and probably a complementary skill set. It looks more confidence-inspiring to have two people.

I haven't tried to look for one. It's kind of just been my baby, and I've been very protective about that. It's been easier to make decisions when it's just me, whether they're the right decisions or not.

But maybe I wouldn't have gone through the whole motivation struggle in December, January, and February if I had someone else keeping things going.

Finding motivation without external pressure...

Because I'm doing this for fun and learning, I don't have that motivating "I need to get this to this financial standpoint." And being a founder is not fun a lot of the time – at least 50% is contracts, co-manufacturers, suppliers, the back end, keeping track of financials.

What demotivated me over the winter was a little seasonal depression…

Sales were going down because it wasn't sparkling water season anymore.

I took a break for the holidays, and then lost a lot of that energy I had put into it. That's really tough to figure out because I don't want to say I should never take a break – that's not healthy.

But taking a break had a big negative impact on whatever routine I had established.

There's a lack of accountability in being a solo founder…

If I don't do it, no one's going to do it.

The next step being a question mark – I knew I needed to produce another batch, but there was no real force to do that. Now that I've got big orders coming in, there is that pressure to figure things out quickly.

Maybe it was the seasonality of the business that tripped me up, or the fact that the things I needed to do to take the next step weren't the fun things.

One thing that ignited me again was the thought of a rebrand, because I love the creative aspects of the business. As a marketer, I love translating my vision for the product into what it looks like, telling the story in a few lines of copy on a can, aligning the tagline with the branding.

In tiny letters, it says "flavor that pops" on every can.

Everyone asks, "How is this different than Bubly, AHA, Perrier, LaCroix?"

And that's not really answered on the can or website…

People also ask, "Why is it called Balloon?"

There are so many dots I haven't connected yet, and that's really exciting from a storytelling perspective.

I'm working with a super talented graphic designer on a rebrand, and that's really exciting and motivating. Finding a co-manufacturer so I can get into retail more significantly is exciting too.

Attending events where I talk to other founders gets me excited and inspired.

Having a creative project makes me willing to do the grunt work because it'll support the rebrand and launch.

The more people involved who ask "Did you do this thing?", the more milestones I want to hit, the more people excited about trying the product and giving great feedback – that's all the stuff that makes me think, "Okay, I'm going to keep going."

From tech layoffs to entrepreneurship...

I have really poor separation between my personal self-worth and my job. I've worked in startups where you get so invested in the company, product, customers, and mission. You drink the Kool-Aid and pour yourself into it

What's great is you're energized every day, very passionate, and willing to do whatever needs to be done to get to the next stage.

Then one day you're on a call with your boss that popped up on your calendar out of nowhere, and they're like, "We're eliminating your role. Here's your severance package."

You go from caring so much and connecting with the customer base and coworkers to being a LinkedIn referral.

"We're on to the next stage of the company, and you're on the sidelines watching us do it."

Going through that so many times is like – I don't own anything. I have my portfolio of content written for these companies, but at the end of the day, I'm back to the drawing board.

It taught me that you only own what you build for yourself, whether that's a business, your family, your network, friends, or colleagues. That's all you have.

Why keep pouring myself into building someone else's dream if I'm expendable?

I need to build for myself because I cannot pour myself into another situation where I'm a line item they can just chop.

Especially in marketing – can't you just be a ChatGPT prompt?

Tech is a total hot mess right now – the job market is crazy.

And I've been de-risking the entrepreneurial journey by leaning on my freelance marketing work. I have the best of both worlds – I can take on projects as needed to keep finances coming in, but I can build my dream until it becomes justified to do it full time. I'm still not taking that full leap that a lot of entrepreneurs do, and I've probably reached the point where I need to.

But I still have my toe in the water, having some income coming in because of mortgages, daycare, all that.

No one talks about the "not raising money" thing.

I was at a panel a few weeks ago, and one founder of a beauty brand said, "No one talks about freelancing while you're doing this, but it certainly helped me get off the ground. There's no way I could bootstrap if I didn't have a steady stream coming in on the side."

The power of building in public...

The whole reason I started posting consistently on LinkedIn is I was at an e-commerce panel last May where Jake Karls from Mid-Day Squares and Mike Fata were speaking about sharing authentic content online.

Jake said, "If you're a founder, you need to be telling your story on LinkedIn. I know this sounds weird, just go do it."

With my lack of accountability, I wondered if I'd actually post consistently and what I'd even say.

A few of us at the event – Andrea Grand from Barbet, Steve Ballantyne from Station Cold Brew, Stephanie Nieto from Mojo, and me – started a LinkedIn DM chat. "We're each gonna post X times per week, and if we don't, we yell at each other. If we do, everyone can comment and like."

I think I was the only one who ended up consistently posting.

Some people were okay for a few weeks then dropped off, and one didn't post at all.

But I started posting twice a week, then dropped off over the winter during my pit of despair.

For the most part, for almost a year now, I've been doing it.

A post I did about branding two weeks ago got over 45,000 impressions and over 150 comments.

My DMs were totally tanked.

Now every time I post, it's like 3,000-5,000 views. I've gotten over 11,000 followers.

People might ask, "What are your sales like? Is it driving sales?" That's not the point – I'm not trying to sell.

I just want to make people feel better about what they're going through as a founder, or on the consumer side, help them understand what it's like and why supporting local is so important.

It's okay to struggle and not know what you're doing.

LinkedIn is my biggest source of organic traffic to my site, but it's not converting to sales most of the time. The side effect is people want to be consultants to help me, or interview me for podcasts, or retailers reach out.

But it makes me feel less alone as a solo founder and builds a community naturally for the brand.

So many people say, "The internet sucks – it's ego-driven, there are trolls."

But I've only seen support – people who want me to succeed and are willing to tag others to help.

There's no way I'd be in a worse position building organic awareness over 12 months, even if I couldn't attribute a single sale. Revenue versus profit – every time I read a success story about someone making millions, I wonder, "Are they in the red? Are they being floated by VC?"

That's my cynical side, but it protects me from the comparison game of "Everyone's crushing it but me," which probably isn't even true.

Even if it is…good for them, but I have to stay in my lane.

If it flops – I'm 40 and just reinventing myself now. I'm a different person in a different position than a few years ago.

Who knows where this will go, but it could be really awesome.

It's weird because it's business, and I have to pitch it to VCs or retail chains.

I need financials, value propositions, and a target audience.

You can build a community and customer base on vibes, but you also need an analytical, data-driven approach. It's interesting to play both sides, and I'm not naturally the pitch person – I'm the vibe person.

But people buy the vibes. I think it could be profitable because people really love it and believe in it and it tastes good.

Everyone's forced to have an innovative angle to their product, but why can't it just taste good?

Why can't that be enough?

That’s it for this issue!

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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

This week, we’re featuring Saud Aziz, the co-founder of Venn, a business banking platform helping Canadian companies manage their finances — from collecting funds to paying vendors across borders.

We got into why “fake it till you make it” doesn’t work in fintech, how Saud and his co-founder went from cold emails to $25M raised, and why customer feedback — not investors or competitors — drives most of their roadmap.

If you’re building in a regulated space, or just trying to grow without throwing headcount at every problem, you’ll get a lot out of this one.

Dive in below!

Venn Quick Stats…

💼 Headcount: 11
⏳ Time in Business: 3.5 Years
💰 Money Raised: $25 Million
👥 Users: 4,000+
📈 Best Growth Channel: Word of Mouth
📅 Sales Cycle: 2–4 Weeks
✅ Conversion Rate from Demos: 65%

Background…

Venn helps Canadian business owners better manage their finances and replace their existing bank.

‘Finances’ means different things to different businesses, but for us, that means we help businesses collect funds more easily.

We provide them accounts in multiple currencies…

We make it easier for them to pay their vendors, whether they're in Canada or abroad.

We also support invoicing, corporate cards, currency exchange, and accounting software integrations.

The bigger goal is to replace the patchwork of tools businesses rely on with one unified platform.

Before Venn…

I studied finance in school, and right after graduating, got on a traditional path. I went into consulting, which was a really good learning experience, but after about nine months, I was pretty miserable.

I had always been very passionate about fintech, even in school, so I decided to take a leap of faith.

I quit consulting, joined this up-and-coming startup called KOHO. They had five employees, and hadn't raised much funding at that point.

My first role was actually in customer support. I had sent a cold email to the founder, and he told me that was the only opening they had. The way I saw it: it couldn’t be worse than what I was doing at the time, so I took it.

I stayed there for a couple of years. Towards the end, I was looking after payments inbound, outbound cost — all that kind of stuff. Then, I ended up joining a European Challenger bank called Revolut.

It was a scale up company and they wanted to expand into the Canadian market so I joined to lead that expansion. For those that aren’t familiar with it, Revolut is based in London but they're super popular across Europe. It's a fintech super app, so it covers consumer banking, business banking, trading, investing, all that kind of stuff.

Revolut is also where I met my co-founder, Ahmed. He was the second hire, right after me, and we worked on building and launching this thing in Canada. Ultimately, the timing wasn't right, and Canada didn't work out, so decided to wind down the Canadian expansion and focus on the US.

Honestly, I wasn't super motivated or excited by making the US better when I felt like we were so far behind here. So, I ended up joining an early stage payments company that had big ambitions for Canada. But within a couple of months, Ahmed and I just kept talking about how the impact that we could have in Canada could be so much bigger.

By then, consumer banking was starting to get more popular — but no one was really tackling businesses. And my parents are small business owners, Ahmed's parents are small business owners. Seeing what was out there, and knowing that it was all pretty terrible, we decided to build a better solution.

The first 12 months…

We raised money right away, because bootstrapping wasn’t really an option.

Then we had to create the actual infrastructure, so we hired a couple of engineers, and they built it.

All in all, it took us about 12 months before we could do our first transaction. Part of that was because we wanted to take a fundamentally different approach from other companies.

There's a lot of barriers in Canada to getting access to the payment rails. Things are moving in the right direction, but we wanted to make sure that we owned the most important and core aspects of our product before anything else.

Some other folks might end up using a third party to help with some of the payments infrastructure. The problem with that is now you no longer own your roadmap, and totally rely on them.

On early fundraising mistakes…

I think we made just about every mistake.

It was the first time either of us had ever fundraised.

And when we were doing it, it was the second half of 2021 — Fintech was red hot.

Every investor loved it.

Every other week there was a headline about a FinTech company raising 10 million dollars.

Given the climate, we went in thinking that it would be super easy.

We didn’t know what we were doing, so we were like, let's create a pitch deck and just message a bunch of people being like ‘you should give us money’.

That didn't work at all.

We probably spent three months trying to fundraise and we were very unsuccessful.

We were just so confused, because we were seeing other people doing it, and we knew that there was such a big opportunity for a product like ours in Canada. The market might be smaller, but Canada doesn't really have much competition.

So, after turning up nothing, we took a step back, and spoke with other folks. Ultimately, we realized that just like many other things — fundraising is a sales process.

I had never done sales before, so I was learning from the ground up. Like the idea of a CRM would be super familiar to any account executive, but it wasn’t to me.

When you're fundraising, you should have a CRM. You should be staggering your reach outs. You should try to organize folks by priority and reach out to your lowest priority first, and get some reps in, and make sure you're hearing what the objections are and then making sure you're addressing those objections in your more important pitches.

I think there’s a ton of great advice out there…

Looking back, if we used Reddit or read some stuff from Y Combinator, we probably could have saved two months.

But it was good to learn the hard way.

Why faking it doesn’t work in fintech…

‘Fake it till you make it’ doesn't really work in banking, and I’ll explain why.

Initially, our thinking was: People are holding their most important asset with us, they're going to be trusting us to receive their revenue, pay their vendors, all that sort of stuff, so we should be presenting ourselves as a very established, large corporation, one that's been around for decades.

The problem with that is: business owners are smart, and they'll see right through that. We realized that it was better to just be candid and really play on our strengths, so we decided to just be ourselves, and it resonated with a lot of people.

That’s one of the biggest things that I hear today. People are like, I love your videos, I love your content, and I would have never expected it. Meanwhile, we were just shooting in the office, knowing they were terrible, but they were real, so we thought, why not put it out, and see what the response is?

The other way to frame it is: the best way to earn trust is for someone to get to know you on a personal level. Everyone that's in one of those videos is on our team, and I think getting to see the people behind the company makes it more real, and that realness earns trust.

Letting feedback shape the roadmap…

The entire point there is just play on your strengths. You're always going to be competing with someone that has 100 times the employees you do, or 1000 times more money than you.

Accessibility and speed is super important in terms of customer feedback. It is one of the main things that has gotten us where we are today. One of my favorite features within the product is someone can go in (if they're signed in) and click on their name in the bottom left. There's a little button that says ‘leave feedback’ and you can upload images, videos — you can write whatever you want.

As soon as someone hits submit, it creates an alert in our customer feedback slack channel and it creates a ticket on our product board.

When we think about product feedback and customer feedback and roadmap planning, I would say about 70 to 80% of what we build comes directly from customer feedback. It is probably the biggest gift that we have today — that customers are willing to actually share their thoughts.

I think it's super important to make sure your customers know that you are accessible, that they can reach you and that you genuinely want them to share this kind of information, because it's been super helpful for us.

The other reason why it's very important is because when we started this, it was to solve our own problems. I had worked and managed business banking accounts for other companies and I knew all of my own personal pain points.

We made sure to solve all of those selfishly when we first launched the product, but after that, you need to know everyone else's pain points. There are a couple conventional ways of finding it: you can go on a customer tour, you can reach out to a lot of folks, but we had to figure out a way to get it at scale.

Finding the right bank partners…

In fintech in Canada, you're either a bank or you're not a bank. And we're in the non-bank category. What that essentially means is: if you want to offer any regulated activity, things like holding funds, issuing credit cards, you have to work with a licensed bank.

Unfortunately, here in Canada, we don't actually have too many banks to begin with, and then there are even fewer banks that actually want to work with fintech companies.

We work with People's Trust, we work with Community Federal Savings bank — quite a few because we offer multiple currencies and that sort of stuff.

The most important thing that we have to pitch to the banking partner is potential and opportunity. Why this is super important for them to prioritize is because they can get business elsewhere, they can go direct to consumer, and they can go direct to business. So the story that we're telling them is we're going to make sure that you're the bank that's on the bleeding edge. You are one of the most innovative, you're going to be powering the next generation of companies.

In practice, our relationship with them is that we're effectively allowed to open accounts on behalf of them. So when you sign up with Venn, we'll open you a Canadian dollar account with our Canadian banking partner, we'll open you a US dollar account with your US banking partner (and so on and so forth) so that you get international banking in one platform.

And — we'll make sure that the whole thing is the smoothest experience for you, whether it's onboarding, actually making payments, creating cards, any of that kind of stuff. At every point in time, the funds are always held securely with license-regulated, insured banks.

Because there's only three or four big banks in Canada, there is massive demand to access them and they can be very selective in who they work with.

Keep in mind: these are older, more established organizations, so they don't move at startup speed.

I don't think we ever had a moment where we weren't going to be able to get a banking partner.

Where we really faced the most difficulty was pitching the idea, because it’s an unprecedented product in a business that’s very traditional.

Offering multi-currency cards?

Concepts like that just didn't exist in banking, so really getting them to understand what it is, why it's important, and ultimately to buy into our vision was the most challenging part.

The difference between founder vs. employee…

There are no more fail safes. Everything stops with you.

There's no decision that you can outsource or deflect, and every decision that you make is not only going to have an impact on you, but it's also going to have an impact on the lives of everyone that is within the company.

It's a pretty big responsibility, and I take that seriously. We have folks on the team that have families and children. Because of that, I know firsthand that this business that we're building is providing for much more than just us.

I think the other thing that surprised me was that there's so much more admin work that you need to do when you don't have supporting functions, and it's always going to be much harder than you thought.

I definitely think we need more entrepreneurs in Canada, but I also think it's a disservice to not give people the full picture of what entrepreneurship is. It's extremely tough. However tough you think it's going to be, it's probably going to be tougher.

Defining roles and picking a co-founder…

We were pretty fortunate to have worked together for four years before starting this.

Our skill set is a little bit more similar than dissimilar and I think that's pretty unique, because typically, the co-founder relationship in our industry is usually non technical paired with technical.

Neither of us have an engineering background, so we fit in with the former. Still, I would say that's actually made things a little bit easier, because we're on the same wavelength with most things.

One thing that we did specifically that I don't think others did: before we started, we wrote down all of the possible departments that exist in a massive organization: Finance, operations, product, tech, HR, sales, customer support, all that sort of stuff.

After that, we both went away, and we each put our names on the different departments, depending on who we thought best to lead it. Then we compared notes to really see who should be owning what function. It was really good to see where we conflicted and where we agreed, and I think that has been one of the most effective things for deciphering who the ultimate decision maker is in a given area.

I understand why people don't do it, because it is a little bit awkward, especially because you eventually have to address the elephant in the room — who's going to be the CEO. But we did that early on and it was incredibly effective.

The importance of founder-led sales…

I'm going to give ourselves a little bit of credit.

Both of us are good at getting good and a lot of it is just through trial and experimentation.

In terms of getting our first 500 customers? That was just pure, brute force.

Messaging just about everyone that we know, asking them to refer it to their network.

Cold emailing, cold calling — all that sort of stuff.

Basically, we learned how to do a lot of these things from scratch.

Some people might recommend that you should just hire someone that's done it before, but I'm a strong believer in that you should at least understand how to do something successfully for your business before you outsource it to someone else.

We didn't hire our first salesperson until one of us had a really good grasp on how to sell the product.

Similarly on marketing, until we know what sort of messaging resonates, or what our best channel is, we're not going to outsource the most important parts of our business.

If you try to compete using the same methods that others are using, you're going to lose, because they usually have more time, more money, and they have a head start. You should just play to your strengths, and that starts with knowing what you can do that's different.

For me, it was founder-led sales.

It’s common, but it's still not as common as it should be.

Until you get your first million or 2 million in revenue, you should try to be doing as much selling as you can on your own.

Venn’s target audience…

We're best for most businesses that have a headcount of 250 or less. We tend to target businesses in the 50 to 250 range, but we are the best account for a brand new business as well.

Why are we best for them? When I think about a business's finances, you can simplify it a lot. There's money coming in and there's money going out. How do they need to solve that? They might be invoicing a customer. They might want to receive funds via Interac e-Transfer. They might need to receive a wire. Do we solve all those use cases? Can we help businesses receive money cheaply, efficiently and easily? Yes.

Why would a business need money to go out of their account? They need to pay a vendor. They have some expenses, taxes, whatever it might be. Can we help them with all of those use cases? 100%.

I think you can distill down the use case of business banking for most companies up to 250 headcount with just those two variables. That's why we're the best suited. When you go a little past 250 there's probably a third bucket that we don't quite solve yet.

Making money without the markup…

I'll start on the revenue side and then I'll talk about how we're able to price more effectively than others.

Revenue — We have a software subscription, so that's recurring revenue. The other share of our revenue is more variable in nature. One is interchange revenue, so anytime you make a purchase on a credit card, whichever one of the big five that card belongs to, the merchant pays them a percentage of the transaction value. It's a fee for helping facilitate the transaction.

Because we offer corporate cards to our customers, that card is technically ours. So the merchant, when they're paying that percentage, it's revenue for us. We share that revenue because we give our customers cash back. But that’s another source for us.

We offer a currency exchange. So we take the real exchange rate — the rates that the banks would be buying and selling currencies amongst each other — and then we add a small fee to that. For context, banks typically charge 2 to 3% — we charge 0.25 to 0.45%.

Then we charge fees for certain types of transfers, but we only charge fees for outbound transfers.

This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves: It makes zero sense that a bank would charge you to receive money, but they do. We incur a cost as well, but it just doesn't make sense to me to pass that cost forward to customers.

So those are the main sources of revenue for us.

In terms of how we're able to price more effectively: I think it’s more of a macro thing. Canadian banks are some of — if not the — most profitable banks anywhere in any country. The costs that we incur are probably 5 to 10 times what the banks are paying because fintech and banking is an economy of scale business.

They have much more volume than us, so their costs are much lower. However, their margin is much higher and their overhead is exponentially higher than us.

People honestly don't believe when I tell them this, but we’re a team of 11 people. That's our headcount versus the big five, so they have a lot more overhead from their larger headcount and there’s even more overhead from legacy systems and poor technology.

It all ties back to playing on your strengths. Because we have a super small team, we have super low overhead and we're getting those economies of scale. As we grow, our costs come down and we pass those savings to our customers.

Scaling with intention…

One of the metrics that I track most closely is revenue per employee, so as long as the business is growing and we're scaling and there's a payback, it makes sense to continue to grow and scale, but we need to be really mindful of that ratio.

We’re not going to be 11 people for much longer. We've already made some offers to some other folks, but in a broader sense, it’s all about being the right size for your stage and knowing what the business actually needs.

It’s a very easy trap to get into — thinking of headcount as solving problems. You need to think about the problem you’re facing first, and how to solve it from first principles.

If it's go-to-market, is your go-to-market efficient?
What are your metrics? Instead of hiring another salesperson, what is your conversion from demo to closed/won?
Can you drive that up first?
Do you think you've juiced that number as much as you can?
If so, then maybe it's time to bring on another hire.

Things like that…

I track our demo to closed/won pretty closely — and it's above 60% — so I think that's a very good percentage to bring on more folks.

I don't really think there's any benchmarks, but I honestly think that each person should be paying for themselves, if not more — otherwise you’re just burning VC money.

On hiring…

We're a team of 11 people.

We're very successful, we've raised a decent amount of funding, but we all work incredibly hard.

I think every single person on the team truly feels like an owner and is acting and operating as an owner.

Finding folks that are ready to sign up for something like this has been tough, and it takes us longer to hire because I want to make sure that when we do hire, we're bringing on the right person.

Finding folks who truly believe in what we’re doing has been challenging, and it ties back to another pet peeve of mine.

I don't think success is celebrated enough — and as loudly as it should be — in Canada. Because of that, there's a lot of folks, especially the younger generation, that think, what's the point of going above and beyond? There isn’t as clear of a link between hard work and achievement.

Looking back, it was extremely beneficial to work at Revolut. I think the company made something like 100 millionaires based on equity, and it also had one of the most intense work cultures. And intensity doesn't mean butts and seats. People were there because they wanted to be there. They believed in what they were doing, and they knew that the effort and impact that they were having not only helped the company, but helped themselves as well.

Lessons learned…

If I were to go back and do things a little bit differently, I’d sign customers up as early as possible, and sign up as many as possible — just do whatever we could to put it in their hands as soon as we could.

Don’t get me wrong, even with all the mistakes we made, we still grew incredibly quickly. I think it took us 10 months to get a million in revenue. But if we had done some of that stuff, maybe we could have done it in five months.

There were a lot of things that we tried in the first six months when we launched.

Stuff that was incredibly unsuccessful.

That being said, something that's really important to me is: don't write things off just because they didn't work. Realize that it only means it didn't work at that time.

When we got our first 500 customers, cold email didn't work. Phone calls didn't work, either.

Now, we get a lot of our customers through those channels.

On the flip side, don't be complacent with what's working today, because there's no guarantee it's going to work tomorrow, either.

Betting on a new wave of Canadian entrepreneurs…

I think there are endless opportunities if people are ready to step up and go after them.

I also think there's a generational shift happening and I'm extremely bullish on it.

I speak with a lot of business owners, and I think there's more and more folks starting side projects now and turning those into businesses.

In the next five years, I expect the number of new businesses created to be some percentage much higher than what it is today.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

This week, we’re featuring Tighe Burke, the founder of Srch, a boutique executive search firm placing CEOs at high-growth internet businesses doing $5M to $50M in revenue.

We got into how he made the leap during COVID, why referrals power nearly every deal, what most recruiters get wrong — and how a conversation with a stranger totally changed his close rate.

If you’ve ever tried to build a high-trust, high-ticket business from scratch, this one’s for you.

Dive in below!

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Srch Quick Stats:

📈 Revenue: $2 Million
👥 Head count: 6
⏳ Time in Business: 4.5 Years
✅ Placements per year: 15-20
💰 Average deal size: $73K
📅 Average sign-to-fulfillment period: 3 months
🌐 Target niche: $5M - $50M internet-based business
💵 Margins: ~90%

Getting started…

I run Srch — the name Grindr was taken at the time, so I pivoted to Srch. *laughs*

We recruit executives for companies — specifically CEOs for early stage businesses.

Most of the time they’re 10-70-person companies doing $5-50 million in revenue. A lot of them are founder-led, and they're looking for a new CEO or a new president to run the P&L and have total responsibility for that company.

We work with these companies to recruit their successors and we've been doing it for four and a half years.

The industries that we work in are anything from SaaS to E Commerce, B2B E-Commerce, D2C E Commerce marketplaces, and a lot of Internet based businesses.

At least, that was the core business, but over the last 18 months the industries we've expanded pretty dramatically, in education and B2B services, among others.

It started in April 2020, when COVID shut down schools. My kids were home, and working as a partner at a search firm gave me some unexpected flexibility.

With retained search, there's a handful of bigger firms out there, and they kind of all compete with each other, and their model is kind of all the same. I didn't realize at the time, but I was on a path toward becoming just another old white guy at a search firm.

All the big ones on the planet — that’s what they’re like at the top.

I specifically remember pushing my kids on the swing and thinking, I could do so much better and have so much more fun…

What if I die tomorrow?

So I had this moment where I thought: I’m doing this myself.

We had two kids and were expecting a third soon, and in the back of my head, I always wanted to, but I didn't have the balls to actually do it, but a couple months down the line, I still hadn’t done anything.

Then I had a conversation with my wife, and I was just bitching about the company I was working at, and she was just like, quit fucking bitching already…

Do something about it.

I was like, well, what do you want me to do about it? And she told me to start my own business.

Honestly, that was the conversation that just pushed me over the edge.

Life is too short to be unhappy, to not be totally fulfilled.

And so I started the business in August, and got my very first client on August 13.

The first six months…

The final catalyst to starting was having a friend who was running a business.

He got in touch, and said that he was looking for a CEO, and wanted to know if I could help. I told him that I was starting my own thing, and asked if he wanted to be my first client — and luckily, he agreed.

Even though I had a relationship with him already, I also knew in the back of my head that I absolutely had to do it well. Effectively, I was betting my entire livelihood on it.

I was leaving the comfort of a stable company with benefits. But I knew if I nailed it, he’d refer me to others — so there was a lot riding on that first gig.

For the first project, I charged him $45K.

The most I had ever earned in a year was around $200K in income, so I was getting a quarter of that in one project in just three months. Then again, I realized I might only receive that one gig for the entire year, so it was a little nerve wracking, but I just reassured myself that no matter what — more was going to come.

It may be $20,000 here, maybe $15,000 here, but I realized that if I constantly worried about what I was going to do, everything else would suffer.

There's never going to be a perfect time to start your business, right?

So, I chose to be intentionally naive about income. And beyond that, I was also thinking, if this doesn't work, I can go find another job to be a recruiter somewhere else.

Obviously, we made it through, but I was also very lucky because my wife took a second job to help cover some of our expenses. Had she not done that, then there’s no way I would have had the balls to take the leap.

On compounding credibility… (and getting a little lucky)

Full transparency, I got lucky — the first client I mentioned, happened to be Sam Parr.

Sam wasn’t quite the icon he is now, but he still had a big following and a $15M business. I knew doing a great job would go a long way.

And to be totally honest, I have an unfair advantage. I'm a white American male. There’s no doubt about it: that’s a good starting place when you're charging $75k to $100k for searches.

I also have a pretty big network just based on my life history…

I have four brothers. I went to college, so I have a lot of friends from there, plus my high school friends. Then I know a lot of my brother's high school friends.

Luckily, a lot of the people that I know came from affluent backgrounds, so even years back, I knew that might prove helpful if I started a business. Odds are, some of them were going to be running businesses, and networking would be a little easier in that way.

When you start a business, you're willing to run through a fucking wall to make it successful, right?

I put a lot of effort into prospecting people early on, staying up after midnight just to do as much homework as I could.

Beyond that, when you work for a brand like the Hustle — which was Sam's business — that buys you a level of credibility you can’t otherwise get.

When people in the startup community found out that I was working on the Hustle, they started taking my calls — they were much more open to giving it a shot.

Once you do the work well — in our case, getting a CEO hired — it kind of has this compounding effect.

And being associated with big people and big brands helps amplify your own.

What really makes a great CEO candidate…

Sourcing candidates is both an art and a science.

Take one of the projects that I'm working on right now: We need somebody who has scaled an Amazon native brand before, but also need some omnichannel experience in retail and D2C stuff.

Ideally, they've been a CEO before or held some position in a P&L.

But they also need to be a savage marketer, and have a really scrappy mindset.

Most of those things that I just described — I can find on paper if I know where to look. The science part is having really rigorous research and having very high standards.

We'll go find Amazon native brands that have scaled from $20 to $100 million in revenue over their lifetime. We’ve got a bunch of different resources to help do that, but then once you get to the mindset, that's a very personal attribute that will vary from person to person.

Really, we're trying to get as many of the people who've got the on paper qualifications as possible, because when you become a CEO, chances are you've got some pretty good soft skills.

Beyond that, so much of what the final placement comes down to is chemistry.

Ultimately, it’s our job to get people who pass the ‘smell test’ as far as hard skills and being culturally relevant, but then once they get to the hiring manager, a lot of it just comes down to who they connect with, which is out of our control.

Lessons learned…

I want to make something clear: recruiting and hiring are two different things.

I could be the greatest recruiter on the planet, but I've made some hires that have not worked out for my own team, which is more fascinating than anything.

With a CEO, usually they've got 20 or 30 years of work history you can rely upon. But me, if I'm hiring someone right out of school, naturally, it’s harder to find a sure thing.

Just like any entrepreneur, I've made some painful hires that cost me a lot of time and money, but it’s a process. You get better over time.

Otherwise in 4+ years, I think I've probably gotten 300 leads, probably 280 of which have come from word of mouth referrals. Any professional services person on the planet would salivate at that sort of ratio because what we're selling is a very high ticket item.

Really, the only problem I had was closing.

I remember, I shared a conversation with this guy — another entrepreneur — at a conference a while back, and I told him, “I get a bunch of leads, but I’m dog shit at closing them.”

At the time, I probably closed on out of every six leads I got.

So he started asking me about my sales process, and I went through it and said “Well, I just set up a call with them and I tell them how we're going to solve their problem. And sometimes they sign, sometimes they don't.”

Immediately, the guy was like, “You don't know what you're doing.”

About a week later, I hopped on the phone with him again, and he told me:

You have to build a script…
Identify the prospect’s problem,
and then really dig into how painful that problem is for them,
and help them understand the cost of not solving it.

After that, bam — you hit them with your pitch.

Tell them your price, and that if they pay it, all their problems go away.

The very next day: I closed a $100k search.

After that, I reached back out and told him I wanted him to be my coach, and he still is to this day.

All of that meaning: I didn’t have the right skill or mentality. I had no idea how to sell.

Honestly, 99% of executive recruiters across the world don't know how to sell either.

They can develop business but they don't know how to sell and they don't know how to close, and it’s a huge disadvantage.

Now, we're closing about 43% of our prospects.

On key man risk…

We would not be a good acquisition target because there's very high key man risk with this.

It’s something that I'm trying to change, but I think about growth the same way I always have, which is it always comes down to the service.

If every single founder we work with loves us, then every single client is probably going to share it with their colleagues at some point. They can be part of mastermind groups, they can be part of peer to peer networks, they can go to retreats with other entrepreneurs, they can broadcast it on whatever platform they want to.

So, as I'm thinking about growth — number one, it's continuing to provide the absolute best service possible because word of mouth is the best engine.

Secondly, it’s about using different paid media platforms where our audience lives.

Thirdly, it would be more about developing a personal brand.

A couple of people have gotten in touch with me lately to say they keep hearing my name — which means there’s potential there.

For that, the idea is to keep penetrating the same audience. I won’t ask for anything, I’ll just stick to providing some expertise.

Balancing growth while maintaining a personal touch…

The key thing here is scaling up the team with some really wonderful people.

I — personally — have moved into more of a manager role, but I still take every pitch.

I still close every deal.

That said, I have an awesome team that deserves a ton of credit for the success we're having, and I don’t see that changing if we continue to have the right people around.

Secondly, I've gotten much better at identifying which leads are going to be good and which aren’t.

A four-person jewelry company hiring a head of marketing? Not our thing, but a 20-person DTC brand doing $16M and looking for a CEO? That's right in our wheelhouse.

So, part of it is having the right people around, and another is a more clearly defined ICP, which allows us to be much more successful in our engagements.

We're always getting feedback from clients.

Every time we wrap up a search, we send a survey:

What'd you like?
What did you not like about this?
How can we do things better?

A lot of recruiters, provide one good candidate and they're like, ‘Jane’ is the one, and that’s it…

They dust their hands and leave it at that.

Those recruiters don't last very long because they didn’t notice that Jane can be a real psycho sometimes or she's just not strategic enough. It's our job to make sure that there's someone else who can be a backup candidate if it doesn’t work out.

Nothing sucks more than getting everyone excited about hiring, and then the guy shits the bed and then realizing you have to start the search from scratch.

Becoming the best boss possible…

I think I've got a lot of work to do as a manager and as a leader of people — this is all very new to me. Sometimes I can be too much of a nice guy and not enough of a hard ass — which isn’t the worst problem to have, but either way, I think that I've got a lot of work to do.

It’s one of my kind of personal goals for this year.

I've been given a lot of opportunities in my life…

I was able to go to an amazing high school, play whatever sport I wanted to. I was able to go to college, have some of that paid by my parents, and get a degree.

After that I lived in Korea and I taught English for two years…If you want to grow up real quick, move to Asia without speaking the native language and you'll figure out how to hang tough.

I think those efforts helped me mature a lot. I also went to — and am currently a board member at — a boys summer camp in northern Wisconsin, which I can't say enough good things about.

It's called Red Arrow Camp and it really helped shape me into a self-reliant individual.

When you're in the oldest senior cabin, you have to take a 10 day canoe trip through the boundary waters. You’ve gotta portage through the woods, and there are no trails, and 1 billion mosquitoes biting you at all times.

It really puts some hair on your chin. So just like a lot of these experiences, I think that shaped me into the type of a leader I am and want to be.

On the business side, I've had some not-great bosses myself, and I’ve used that to be better just by doing the opposite.

Biggest challenges…

What we have is not a recurring revenue model. It's very transactional.

There is some predictability involved, given that we’ve been doing this for long enough and we have a lot of data, but there is no set formula. So the biggest challenge I’m facing is keeping the pipeline going and making sure that there's always a long list of people that we can provide an awesome service to.

When you think about it, most 20 or 30-person companies need a CEO once every five years. So this is not something that they're going to come back for again anytime soon, especially if we’ve done our job well.

Until we find a way to diversify in a notable way, that lack of repeatability is definitely a threat to the business.

Networking while building a remote business…

I found a lot of value in meeting other entrepreneurs over the last two years at different events.

I used to go and listen to the talks. Now, I don't even listen to talks anymore. I just go hang out, have beers, and make new buddies.

What we sell is so expensive that so much of our relationships have to be organic.

It's a huge barrier to entry for any people who want to start a recruiting business.

I tried mentoring two dozen people last spring, and I could teach them everything about recruiting, but the business development part's so damn hard because it takes so long to develop these relationships. People just don't have the savings to withstand not getting any income for six months or a year.

No doubt, having a lot of pre-existing relationships has been a competitive advantage, especially early on. But apart from that, everything's been remote since day one, and it hasn’t been that hard.

Staying top of mind without playing the fame game…

When I lived in Korea, I would get on the bus and everyone was staring at their fucking phone.

It drove me nuts. I thought, this bus could crash or someone could hijack this bus and every one of these people just be sitting ducks because they have zero idea what's happening. And that was in 2011.

I think for my own personal brand, I know we have an audience, and I need to make sure that people keep hearing my name, but I don’t want it to be super transactional.

I'm doing some other things to get myself out there. I’m speaking at the Holdco Conference in Utah in a couple weeks. I’m pretty stoked about that.

I've also written a 70,000 word book. Here’s me being shameless…laughs

It's a fable about an entrepreneur who runs and builds a great business, but just hates his life. His marriage is falling apart and he finds this person who can help turn it around and everything gets better as a result.

I've never really sought the limelight. It's not something I'm comfortable in.

I've always thought that if I could build a $10 million business and nobody really knows a lot about me, that’s a win. With the way the internet works now, it’s easier said than done, though.

But I don't have an Instagram, I don't have Twitter, and I'm happy to keep doing that.

Why most recruiters fail…

There's a low barrier to entry to become a recruiter, because the costs are so low.

We have some software tools, and we have salaries, and that’s about it, so it’s a very profitable business. I think a lot of people hear that, and think, man, I can make so much money if companies just hire me to recruit for them.

Then, they inevitably run into a big, problematic question: why would that company hire you? You're a nobody. You don't have any expertise.

Beyond that, there’s a very high failure rate because people aren't willing to put in the work, and honestly don't have the creativity and the charisma to develop relationships and provide value.

Every entrepreneur on the planet gets unsolicited inbound from some RPO india who can “do it better than anyone”. That stuff speaks to what a lot of wannabe recruiters could learn, because that kind of outreach is brain dead and feels transactional, which is the exact opposite effect you want.

People who want to become recruiters don't understand that. They have to give to people before they can get from people.

What long term success looks like…

Honestly, the vision is just to create an awesome place to work.

A lot of people hate where they work, because they don’t have fun, or their boss sucks, or they get shitty benefits. Conversely, this business can also challenge people and inspire people and help them grow.

To me, that’s a legacy worth chasing.

So, in 30 years when this thing's all said and done, if we’ve given a couple dozen people the opportunity to find meaningful work in their lives, that’s success to me.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

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• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

This week, we’re talking with Amanda Avent — a Swiss-born entrepreneur who turned a personal no-sugar challenge into Simple Bars, a natural snack brand she built from scratch in the U.S.

From cold-calling stores to flying in food scientists and navigating the maze of co-packers, Amanda shares the real moments behind the business — including the two times she almost walked away, and what pulled her back in.

Dive in below!

Simple Bars Quick Stats:

📆 Years in Business: 2.5
😮 Times Almost Quit: 2
🍫 Number of SKUs: 4–5

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Getting Started…

They say it takes three weeks to change a habit, and a few years ago, I challenged myself to stop eating sugar. So I thought, you know what? Let me try three weeks, cut off from sugar completely.

So, when I went to grab groceries, I really started reading the listed ingredients on packages. I had no idea how to read nutritional tables, but I just knew I wasn’t going to buy anything that had sugar as a listed ingredient.

I did that for maybe a week and a half, and it was terrible.

I got headaches, mood swings, you name it.

But then the third week came around, and my skin got clearer, I slept much better, and I had a lot more energy.

Because I felt so good, I just kept saying, “let's do another week…”

And weeks became months, but my problem was just snacking on the nuts all the time. Natural foods I was okay with, but after months of eating nuts, you get sick and tired of them.

So I started making my own bars in the kitchen.

Eventually though, I realized there's NO way I'm the only one struggling with this, because you couldn't find a single natural snack bar at the grocery store without sugar, so I thought about turning it into a business.

I reached out to a food scientist in San Francisco and told her what I was doing. I went to her lab, and for the first three days, it was a disaster.

We tried different types of sweeteners, and finally, she introduced me to allulose, and made some with it. It wasn't too sugary, but the bars were very stringy, which I wanted to fix.

Then she brought in a friend who's also a food scientist, and I got really lucky, because it was Erika Thornton. She worked with CLIF Bar when they first started.

She’d been with the company for years, but wanted to do her own food science consulting services, to which I was her first customer. And all kudos to her — she made something work within a week.

I didn’t have a food industry background at all, and if you would have told me years ago that I’d end up here, I would’ve never believed you.

I’ve always been a healthy eater, but I wasn't a hardcore health advocate or anything.

At the time, I was just finishing my Bachelors in Business, and I knew I wanted to do something for myself. I just didn't know what it was.

I should mention — I've always been very inspired by my dad, who's a serial entrepreneur. I’ve always looked up to him and admired what he’s done, so in some ways, it felt natural, I just didn't know how or what it was going to look like.

But the health habit happened and that’s when doing it as a business struck me, and I followed it.

Working with Co-Packers…

First off, there are different co-packers at different sizes. Everyone has their own minimum order quantities.

And our situation in particular was difficult because in order to produce our bars, we needed three of the main machines that not that many co-packers have—mostly just the larger ones.

Some of these larger copackers — we’re talking minimum order quantities of a million bars a month, some per WEEK.

Luckily, we found the ideal co-packer that we started with and were able to do a test run of 15k units.

Not nothing, but better than a million. laughs

The early days…

Launching a business is a bit different for me, because I'm from Switzerland.

To fund a company in the US, you have to go through different requirements for the E2 visa. Under the student visa, you can work only a limited number of hours but not create your own business. I knew I wanted to be in California because that's where all the health trends start. The visa that made the most sense was the E2 because it gives me four to five years.

So, I finished my study abroad, came back to Europe and I had to figure out how to create an LLC.

I had to do everything in a different time zone, obviously, so I would go to college during the day and at night stay on the phone until 4 AM with people in the US, figuring out how to do this. It was definitely difficult, because I was balancing school, but I had all this energy because it was so new, exciting and it was mine.

I also knew that if I didn't do it, nobody else was going to do it. So it just felt natural.

Early Customer Outreach & Branding…

So after I got the visa, I moved to LA for a few months. While I was there, I remember driving through Malibu,, and I would just stop at stores — one by one — and I would give them the samples we had and collect their business cards. After that, I created this huge Excel sheet.

Then, when we finally did production, I just emailed all of them and I was like, hey, this is the final product, you can buy it on our website.

With all the door-knocking, I think we generated a lot of word of mouth, but we just kept going to different places and approaching different people — until we started working with a distributor. That really kicked things into gear.

Instead of us reaching out all the time, people started coming to us.

Small stores, big stores — everyone.

So things flipped completely, and it’s stayed pretty consistent since then.

Best Sales Channels & Evolving Goals…

I'm not in a rush to grow.

I've always wanted to take it slowly and enjoy the journey, rather than looking to exit in a set amount of time. Entrepreneurship culture in the US — I’ve noticed — is very much about building something, selling it, and moving on.

That's not something I want to do.

Growing slowly has been our approach from the get-go, and I think it’s a huge part of our success.

All those food brands that you see out in the stores?

I learnt that more than half of them aren’t making money.

To get into huge retailers, there are so many associated costs, and it’s hard for most companies to turn a profit.

With our approach, I’ve always kept us in a position where we're not losing money, even if it means saying no to big deals.

E-Commerce is a stable channel for us, through subscriptions, mostly. But it depends.

We have this cruise that we supply.

It’s for nutritionists, and it’s a huge order, but it’s seasonal.

Bigger stores, there’s a certain level of consistency, but small and medium retailers, you just don’t know.

We also work with another distributor in New York. He got us into 100 different new stores throughout New York and New Jersey. But again — he only placed a few orders, so it fluctuates a lot, to be honest.

What you gain by working with smaller retailers in terms of profitability, you definitely feel the trade off with less consistency in working with the big box stores.

Demand Planning & Production Challenges…

Honestly, in the beginning, it was about matching the minimums our co-packer was asking, so I didn't really have a choice. We had to do a much bigger production that we needed, then instead of doing a certain amount a year, we decided to break it down so we have fresh products on a consistent basis.

But you can never really plan. Recently, we had this one deal come out of nowhere and they said they needed product on a really tight timeline, so we had to rush the production and everything was insane.

And then you have to get the ingredients on time.

We order most of everything from California, and tend to overnight them for rush production, which is very expensive.

It can be tough, but our co-packer is very flexible and also knows that if you grow, they grow, and ours is really great. They are very flexible with dates and go out of their way to make sure we hit production on time.

I used to do all of the planning alone, too, but now I have this company that oversees all of our sales, which has been helpful.

Lessons Learned…

Something I'm good at — I think — is production. Getting the ingredients, getting the product, going to the plant, making sure everything's done properly. I think I’m also quite good at outreach, just because I've done it so much over the years.

All this being said, I'm a perfectionist. I lost so much time agonizing over the packaging, the logo, the ingredients — everything, really — originally. I’ve worked on it for a while.

It’s been a huge lesson to just get looser with decisions, and remind myself that most things aren’t ‘make or break’.

For a period of time, we worked with independent contractors, and some agencies, but we eventually hired some dedicated staff. The downside, of course, is paying more out of pocket, but it’s taken so much weight off our shoulders, and it’s easily been one of our best decisions.

Even still, delegating was very hard for me, and it took a long time to get to a stage where I was comfortable passing things off.

One of the biggest unexpected lessons I’ve learned is that there isn't one single way to do things.

You can study how successful CEOs built their empires, but they did so in different times and contexts. There are countless ways to approach business, and your journey will be shaped by its own unique circumstances.

And if I were to start again from scratch, maybe I would try to start producing less at the beginning — that was very expensive.

Oh — hiring faster. And by faster I don't mean quicker, just sooner.

Getting more outside help, delegating much sooner than what I did originally.

Honestly, for the first few months, that would have made a huge difference, because you’re hiring people who actually have experience in the industry, and that’s invaluable.

They usually have contacts, so it’s a lot easier to establish a network instead of just going door-to-door like we did.

Working in the US vs Europe…

American culture is all about work. There’s this overarching sense that if you don't struggle, you're not doing it right. People are so proud of saying that they work until like 3 AM, and that’s strange to me.

I studied abroad in Australia, and people there have what I think is the best mentality.

They're laid back, they laugh about themselves — they're just easy going. People stop working in the afternoon just to go surfing. They really prioritize work-life balance and make time to enjoy their friends and family.

In Europe, I feel it's a bit in between.

It depends where you are, but for the most part, there’s a pretty good balance.

It was very hard for me in the beginning, because I felt a lot of culture shock. But looking back, I think being around the ‘US mentality’ actually helped me a lot, because it made me work like crazy to build something. It’s not healthy in the long term, but it’s useful if you’re an entrepreneur and want to get somewhere early on.

Now, I’m more grounded. I’m into the Australian mentality more than I used to.

Back then, I would never take a day off, even on weekends, and now I give myself a lot of room to rest and recharge.

On Mentors…

When I researched how to do a business, I found something called SCORE — it’s basically this initiative that the government runs to help people build their own business. They give you a bunch of mentors that you can reach out to for free, so I would reach out to these different people in all these different categories.

Marketing, accounting, everything.

Eventually, I got referred to Richard Lamb, former co-founder at Balance Bar which was sold for $268 million by Kraft Foods who happened to be a local and also worked in the industry, so it was a perfect match.

We had a few calls, I met him, and he just gradually became a bigger help. I would send him contracts from the co packer or different stores and ask him, like what do you think? Like what would you change?

He made a lot of changes to make sure we wouldn’t be put in trouble, so that’s been very important.

Working with Family…

As much as I was able to do everything on my own in the beginning, it eventually got to a point where I was too overwhelmed. My sister Mélanie was really good at supporting me throughout those times, and she saw everything evolve — she was there when I designed the logo, and got our first samples.

Separately, I was debating getting someone on board. Well, I wasn’t debating — I wanted to get someone, but I had a hard time trusting that someone would care as much about the product as I did. Then I thought, why not Mélanie?

She’d just graduated. Even though she had a completely different career lined up, she came in, and she has been nothing short of incredible. I wouldn't be able to do it without her. We make decisions together. It takes a ton of the weight off, and it’s actually been better for our personal relationship.

Most Challenging Experience…

There are two that stand out.

Early on, I had two co-packers at once, and it was a nightmare.

Keep in mind, it takes months to find each of them and just get a “trial”, even though you pay for every test product. Plus, you have to fly in yourself and your food scientist, and pay for hotel accommodations — it gets very expensive.

At that point I was like, alright maybe this isn’t what I should be doing.

I had lost so much money and time.

Then, Mélanie came in and we got to work. We just went full on search mode, and then we found the co packer we currently work with — and we’re so lucky to have them. I’m so grateful.

The second time was a few months later, when we were still reaching out to stores non-stop.

We were reaching out all the time, not getting answers, constantly following up and getting offered deals that weren’t worth it. We were just losing a lot of money and not getting enough sales, plain and simple.

So, this one weekend, we were in Florida, I just kept thinking, I really want to be done with this. It's just not worth the stress. And then — I can’t even make it up — I was in our hotel room, and I got an email from a customer, asking us when more bars would be available.

It was simple, but that message was just a signal that we were genuinely helping people.

That it's bigger than us, you know?

So that really gave me a kick, and from there we just switched everything.

That's when we started hiring, and we really changed our entire strategy.

And I'm so glad we did.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

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• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

  Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This week, we’re chatting with James Zhao — a former L’Oréal brand manager and Turo growth marketer who left the safety of corporate life to build his own creative agency, No Growth.

From learning Facebook Ads in his childhood bedroom to scaling a 19-person team in under two years, James opens up about early mistakes, landing his first clients, and why being “a little stupid” might be the ultimate founder superpower.

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to trade stability for creative freedom — and build something real from scratch — this one’s for you.

Dive in below!

No Growth Quick Stats:

🗓️ Time in business: 2 years
👥 Headcount: 19
💰 Average Deal Size: $5-6K
📈 Best growth channel: Inbound from personal brand, LinkedIn and Instagram
🎯 Target margin: 35-40%

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From L’Oréal to leading No Growth…

Prior to this, I was a brand manager at L'Oreal, doing traditional management-CPG stuff.

After that, I was an in house growth marketer at Turo — basically the Airbnb for cars — for two years.

Now, I run a creative agency called No Growth, a company I started with my fiancé Sally, and we basically do two things: we produce creatives, so concept, research, scripting, shooting, editing — everything in house.

Then we also do media buying on Meta, TikTok and Google.

A lot of the entrepreneurs I see online, they were the kids who sold lemonade and traded Pokémon cards for a profit…

I did none of that.

I was on the conventional path for most of my life, and in my 4th year of university, I had two options: I could go to L'Oreal, or I could work for a startup in Berlin. I was way more excited for the opportunity in Berlin, but I picked L'Oreal, because it was a safer bet. It’s also a Fortune 500 company, and I knew my parents would be really proud if I got a job there.

After working there for a little while, I started applying into tech.

I interviewed for The Hustle — a newsletter started by Sam Parr. I loved his podcast, and I thought he was such an interesting guy, which was incredible, because I actually got to speak to him over the phone during the interview.

Anyway, I was shitting bricks prepping for this interview, and because it was scheduled around Christmas, my fiancée and I actually had to pull over on the side of the road to do the interview, on our way to a holiday dinner.

It was over CarPlay, so she heard the whole thing.

I ended up getting an offer, but then I later got an offer at Turo, and I ended up taking the Turo offer — again, it was just a bit safer.

But jumping back to when I was at L’Oreal, I was a brand manager, which — if you studied marketing in business school — you know it’s one of the more prestigious jobs you can get in that space.

My parents were super proud, and my friends were really happy for me, but I just got burnt out.

Around then, one of my friends got on Dragons Den for her startup. Her product was this high-fiber, high-protein chocolate snack, and she actually got two Dragons to invest.

Afterwards, she called me up, and she was like, James, when I graduate, I want to go all in on my startup. You're my only friend in marketing. You run all these cool campaigns and you run all these cool ads. How do I go and get 10 customers?

I remember sitting there, and I was like, “I don't fucking know.”

At the time, I was managing a brand that was doing about $150 million a year, and it dawned on me: this brand has been around for like 80 years, and I’m the one managing the system?

I don’t know a fucking thing.

All at once, I realized my skillset was useless — nothing was tactical.

So I pivoted.

I Learned Facebook Ads and did a bunch of free work for my friend's company.

I was really lucky that I had a mentor, Quinton, who taught me Facebook ads, and I remember my firs time running an ad on Facebook.

It was about $13 that we spent to put it out and we got $36 a purchase….

That's like a 2.5x ROAS.

I woke up, checked my mobile app, saw it and I freaked out.

I thought it was the coolest thing ever—I had just turned a dollar into $2.50.

Even though I was essentially doing the same thing at L'Oreal, it felt completely different, because in this case, it was all me, and I got feedback instantly.

So I got hooked, and then used that experience to get into Turo.

Full disclosure: I was extremely under-qualified for that gig, but I put in an insane amount of effort during the application process.

But when I started working at Turo, that's where the golden handcuffs came.

Tech was booming around 2020, and Turo was growing really fast. When I joined, the company had like 10 to 15 people in Toronto, and by the time I left, it was like 50.

Really quickly, I got comfortable…

People were really nice, I enjoyed being there, honestly, but I just felt like I checked off the list of things that people expected of me, but hadn’t spent any time really thinking about what I actually wanted.

So I looked for ways to work through it.

I got a lot of perspective from a guy named Dr. K on YouTube — an ex-monk turned Harvard psychiatrist — who talks about finding purpose.

He went to India to train as a monk and planned to renounce normal life, but his master was like, you have nothing to renounce.

Go back to America, build a life for yourself.

Then you’ll have shit to renounce.

If you want to renounce it then, come back and I'll take you in.

So he goes back to America,
goes to med school at 30,
ends up training at Harvard,
becomes a really great psychiatrist,
and starts working with investment bankers and CEOs.

And then he realized, nobody is helping this generation — the internet generation.

So, as I discovered him, I went through therapy, and what I discovered was there were two things that really made me leap into entrepreneurship…

One, I want to be at the top 1% of my field…

When you’re in a corporate environment, it's really difficult to do that.

In my day-to-day, I was getting really good at managing stakeholders, Google Slides, and performance reviews, but I wasn’t getting better as a marketer, per se.

The second thing was just looking ahead 10 or 15 years.

When I have kids, I really want to be a great dad, and I want to have a ton of time to spend with them. I just didn't see that from working in a corporate job. I looked at my brother in law, who’s in his 40s, owns a business, and plays tennis with his daughter at 3pm in the summer.

That's the life I want.

So, I remember I went to this Candlelight Fever concert, and it was a string quartet playing Joe Hisaishi, who’s the composer for a lot of Studio Ghibli films.

I was just there getting lost in music and I thought, if that's the life I want in 10 years with my family, then I have to start now.

I walked out of that concert, I told Sally, my fiancé, that I was gonna quit my job on Monday.

And I did.

On getting the first 10 customers…

I was freelancing on the side for the entire two years I was at Turo. It was never serious, but I had one to two clients consistently towards the end of 2022.

All of a sudden, I started getting these inbound requests, and I signed three new clients. At that point, I was making $6,000 a month on top of my day job.

At the same time, my day job was draining me so much, so I just wasn't hustling that hard, until I gave my resignation in October. My last day was December, though, which turned out to be wild, because a ton of layoffs started happening that month.

I lost half of my clients after that. Which was crazy.

For a while, I had operated under the assumption that everything was going to be fine, and it’d all work out, and then I just had this moment where I realized if I didn’t do something to get more clients, I was gonna be fucked.

So, I put a lot of thought into how I was going to stand out, and looked at what other agencies did.

The first thing is that a lot of them charge a percentage of your ad spend, which means their compensation isn’t actually correlated with your results. I thought that was bullshit.

The second thing was sometimes agencies charge really high retainers — which, to be fair, I am one of those agencies now — but I noticed that agencies charged really high retainers without any sort of guarantee.

At the time, I thought that was bullshit too, so I was like, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and decided to charge a percentage of the revenue I generated for the clients, meaning if they didn’t grow, I wasn't going to get paid.

So, I called my company No Growth — which is a stupid name — but it stuck around and people liked it, and I like it now too. ne

The first iteration of my website literally said “No growth, no pay.”

The first week of January, I made a LinkedIn post saying all the usual stuff — I quit my job, and I’m launching my new business, yada yada yada — and I literally got like 14 calls booked that week.

I went from like two to 10 clients within that first like month and a half.

Early lessons…

It was stupid to do revenue and profit sharing…

You attract clients that can't pay, so you're just doing work for free.

I had a couple clients where I couldn't get them enough results, and my invoice was like a hundred dollars at the end of the month.

After that, I had to approach them and be like, I love working with you. I think you guys have a huge potential. Can we shift to retainer so that we can keep going?

And luckily they were happy to do it.

I think it was a great way to solve the cold start problem…

I needed to get customers ASAP, and nobody knew me, so it was a great way of getting case studies and referrals.

There's beauty in being stupid.

I think my friends who are incredibly intelligent usually have a really hard time going all in and starting a business. They’ll think up an idea and then find 20 things that could go wrong with it, and get paralyzed.

When I think of an idea, I'm like, fuck it, let's just do it and we'll see what happens. If it goes wrong, we can always pivot.

Unexpected challenges…

Around April that first year, we had these vacations pre booked — ones from before I quit my job. We had to work remotely both times, and it was awful.

I’d believed in the whole ‘digital nomad’ thing for a while, but it was way more than I bargained for. It was stressful, tiring, and anxiety inducing.

I don't regret it, but I realized the sacrifice that I needed to make was to hunker down and work until I can afford to take vacation.

The second thing was around hiring. I didn't know what I expected, but having someone full-time where their livelihood is based on you and you have to manage your growth and all that stuff is a huge responsibility, and we definitely had a mental roadblock there for a little while.

Luckily, once we hired our first employee, I actually found it easier to scale because they could help train the second person we hired, and so on.

One of the things I’m also working through now is reconciling how my impact is starting to diminish, because we have so many more people on staff.

But my responsibility is to be a leader and to help my team grow, so I’m doing that as best I can.

Leadership & growth…

I was really fortunate enough to hire our head of accounts this year. He takes care of parts of sales, account management, and client relationships. He's amazing.

What I'm aiming to figure out now is key man risk stuff. It's a double edged sword, because I have a personal brand, a lot of leads come in through me, and I do want to grow a bigger personal brand. But we need to develop a system that can help us get new clients without relying on me.

I see this a lot with a lot of companies — they always suck at the opposite thing of what they're amazing at.

I know agencies who have zero inbound, but they're outbound machines.

And then we literally do zero outbound and everything's inbound.

We definitely suck at cold emails.

Like, I literally don't know how to do it because I don't need to. But still, it’s something we’re not good at.

I want us to be more well rounded and to tap into things that work instead of just sticking to what we know.

What works (and doesn’t) in paid media…

I’ll preface by saying that I'm lucky that I'm operating in the creative and video production space…

When you're in a space that not a lot of people love to get into — like ours — there's 100 million media buying agencies, but there's 100x fewer creative agencies because it's so hard to operationalize.

The flip side of that is just by doing the hard thing well you end up being at the top 20% of your field, which is really great. And a lot of it really just comes down to doing the basics.

There's no secret, there's no hack.

It's just like fundamentals: getting good shots, shooting in good lighting, screening for talent properly…

The people that shoot your ads — we call them UGC actors — aren’t typically working with agencies on a full-time basis. They work with plenty of clients themselves, so you're just one of many agencies that work with them, and some of them are kind of sloppy, or unreliable, so, we started having one on one calls with every one of them before we ever started to work together just to develop a relationship.

That ended up working way better because we can count on them much more.

In terms of other high level stuff, I think a lot of I think some brands are still tied up by perfectionism.

A lot of companies really want their content to feel and look branded, but ultimately, you need to hack attention.

When you publish an ad, you're not competing against your competitors ads, you're committing against cute cat videos too, right?

You really have to blend in and not make your ads look like ads, which is why UGC works so well.

The reality of video retention is that at around three seconds, you'll only have about 30 to 40% of people stay — if your ad is amazing.

If your ad is still good at 15 seconds, only about 10 to 15% of people will stay.

Then at the 100% mark, which is all the way at the end, 1.5 to 3% on average will stay if the ad is good enough.

It sounds bad, but if you think about 3% of thousands or hundreds of thousands impressions — that's a lot of people. And that 3% are the ones that are most likely to buy your product.

I have a lot of brands who care about the length for no reason. They say that they need to get the brand name in the first second. And what I tell them is that there is no ad that is too long, only an ad that is too boring.

Clients are always looking for performance, but they’re clouded by their preconceived notions about advertising.

Another thing I’ll say is that you need to be someone that understands social media — which is another way of saying that you need to consume a lot of social media. You need to have TikTok and IG on your phone. You need to scroll with the intention of researching and seeing what's working.

A lot of our meme ads are just pure white — because that’s what a lot of the memes that go around look like. Those ads work really well, believe it or not, and a huge part of that comes from staying keyed into trends.

The last thing we do really well is research.

There's a saying out there: the best copywriters don't really write. They listen.

If we take the language that your customers use on Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and you repeat it back to them, it's going to resonate.

Navigating a changing industry…

I'm not sure if this is a fact, or if this is just my personal opinion, but there aren’t a lot of businesses out there that truly care about leveling up their craft and getting better at what they do, so if we ourselves do that, then we're just getting ahead automatically, regardless of industry changes.

Change is also good in client-based work. If you land a massive client, but you're stagnant at what you do, your relationship is going to decay, and someone like me is going to have a chance to get that client. So it can work in your favour.

Keep in mind, I haven't hit any rock bottoms yet. I haven't had moments of desperation, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know how to feel if all of a sudden I lost 80% of my clients because of some massive industry shift. I guess I’m just optimistic.

There's a content creator called Mino. He teaches people how to make content and personal branding stuff.

Last year he started this Instagram content series called Road to 100k. In it, he talks about how he went from making 10k a month and feeling awesome to making 50k a month and feeling shit.

I can kind of relate to that.

Back when I was making less, things were simpler and there was less to stress about.

Anyway, one of the things he talked about this year was trying to pursue a feeling instead of a number. No stress, being happy, and sacrificing profit margin to get there. That’s been super inspirational. It’s something I want, but I can’t lie, it’s hard to prioritize.

At the very least, I don’t want to get too caught up in the numbers. If we do that, then we run the risk of scaling too fast, and then self-destructing. I'm more worried about us destroying ourselves than the industry doing it in the future. But maybe that’s because I try not to read into that stuff too much.

I just put my head down and just do my thing.

Future goals…

I’m pretty bad at setting concrete goals, but I want to grow as much as possible while making sure that we still enjoy the day to day.

Currently, I have hobbies and I have time for other things. I don't dread tomorrow and I enjoy today. That's how I want everybody in my company to feel.

Obviously, if the business grows, that’d be preferable. But if the company grows 50 versus 100 next year, it's not going to change anybody's life — myself included.

Something I'm really proud of right now is that we have 100% retention. Nobody has quit.

I know it's unrealistic to keep that forever because some people will just quit for random reasons, but ideally I want to keep that up as long as possible.

When I was at my old jobs, I always felt that when people left, the cost of them leaving was so massive. Productivity and morale always took a hit.

I don’t want that to happen here, especially because as a service based agency, your people are your product. So if my people are doing good, that's what really matters.

Right now, our biggest challenge is systems.

The biggest way that elite systems would play in our agency is helping us level up our craft.

What I'm working on right now is a system that has historical data on the creatives that we've done or that we've seen — something with really actionable data.

Hypothetically, if we had that bank, whenever we do creative research, we could add to it. Then over time, we’d have a reliable source of information to direct future work. Say we get a new client in a certain niche, that bank would be this thing that we could reference to understand the highest performing content in that niche.

That would make life so easy, but we currently don't have a system like that. And that’s just one of 10 other possible systems that we could build to level up the effectiveness of our team and the quality of our work.

Proudest moments…

I remember the April when we were gonna leave on vacation to Turkey.

That was the same trip that I proposed to Sally, and it was right before the trip we wrapped up that month's finances and were making more money than before. W

We quit our jobs and that was four months into the business.

And we screamed and celebrated that shit. And I called my mom and it was awesome.

That was huge because our goal was just to make as much money as before while doing our own thing.

We did that in four months. That was awesome.

I think another really big moment was each of the big hires: my creative director, my head of accounts, and my lead video editor. Those were such massive wins.

Hiring is so hard, so it literally feels like I'm winning a lottery ticket every time we have a big hire and it fundamentally changes the business.

Another big win was me speaking at this conference this past September. It was called the Ecom North Summit. It was in downtown Toronto and had about 700 D2C brands there.

I was one of the speakers because I had this bargain with the founder of the conference. I made ads for them and in exchange, they gave me a keynote and booth. That talk went really well. I pulled like two all nighters that week to prep it. I was insanely stressed but pulled it off.

I went back to my booth and then I had like literally a lineup for the next two hours of people wanting to talk to us. It was insane.

I remember the director and CEO of Mastermind Toys lined up to talk to me. I didn't know who they were at first, I just assumed they were representing some small business. But they came and talked to me and we closed them a month later.

That was such a good feeling, knowing I delivered a great speech, and then just like being on the red carpet for the next two hours, people lining up to come talk to me. It just felt really great.

And then the last piece is probably my content journey. That thing as a whole was huge.

It's kind of like a hack, because if you have good content, and you tell stories, it just opens up so many doors. People don't know what you're capable of if you’re not sharing it.

I started posting YouTube videos back in 2012 when I was in middle school. I grew up on YouTube, so making content was always something I wanted to do.

And this year, probably for the 20th time, I decided to try it again, and it caught some traction. It just felt surreal.

A lot of things in life feel impossible. Starting a business, making content and actually getting followers and views. This year, I checked off a lot of those boxes that felt impossible.

On shiny object syndrome…

SaaS is super hot right now. Agencies, not so much. DTC used to be super hot. Nowadays, it's SaaS or AI.

As a consequence, you’ve always got this feeling that the grass is greener on the other side. So much of entrepreneurship culture revolves around going to work on something big. And it's really easy to be like,

Is the thing I’m doing the right thing?
Should I be building this?
Should I shut down the agency and do SaaS or E Comm?

I thought about that a lot last year.

I was really confused and lost and I didn't know what to do — even though things were going well. Then, once I went to Ecom North, things changed. It catalyzed our business even more, and it also gave me the opportunity to join them as a co-founder.

I got close with Nick, who's the original founder of Ecom north and this company called Stallion, and part of that is because of this retreat that I hosted with Tuan called Build and Chill.

It’s a founder's retreat. Four days, three nights, with the intention of just building genuine friendships.

It sounds a bit corny, but I feel like as a founder, you eventually distance yourself from your core friends — the people who you met in University or high school — because they can’t relate to you as much. And even when you go to founder events, most of the time, the people you become friends with aren’t real friends, they're value exchange friends.

What I was looking for were friends first who happened to be founders.

So, after joining Ecom North as a co-founder, that gave me clarity around what I was doing and how it was worthwhile.

And so now for the next three to five years, I'm like locked in. I'm not really looking around at other opportunities.

This is my hand and I'm playing it.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

Share The Come Up

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

  Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This week, we’re diving into a conversation with Blake Harber, a former venture-backed tech exec who took an unconventional leap into consulting and small business acquisitions.

From scaling startups to building a portfolio of vending machines and an electronics distribution business, Blake shares the hard-earned lessons of solopreneurship, pricing, and finding product-market fit outside of tech.

If you’re curious about the realities of owning multiple businesses—or what happens when your best customers retire overnight—this one’s for you.

Dive in below!

Subscribe now

📊The Numbers:

🏢 Businesses Owned: 3
💼 Consulting: $600K, 90% margin
🔌 Appleton (Electronics): $450K, 35% margin — $1M purchase
🍫 Vending Machines: $180K, 50% margin — $220K purchase
😤 Times he almost quit: ~24

Before business ownership…

I spent the last twelve years in venture-backed tech.

Before that, I built and sold a digital marketing agency— really just a business that played ads on TVs placed around high foot traffic areas in my hometown.

I built that business from the ground up and did it for two years and then had a media company acquire me, which was a catalyst to get into tech.

But I didn't want to go to the Bay Area, so we came here to Salt Lake. I joined a company called HireVue. They were doing about 3 million in revenue and ended up building their inside sales team out. We had a pretty big exit to PE.

Then I joined a company called Lucid.

They hadn't built a B2B function yet and built out their go-to-market team and went from $3 million to $100 million in four years.

I left there and joined a company called Workstream based in Palo Alto. They wanted to build their go-to-market team here in Salt Lake, so I was brought in to build that from the ground up.

We went from $400k to about $ 20 million in two years and raised $100 million Series B.

It was a hell of a run, but I've got four young kids and a wife, so I wanted to be able to spend more time with them.

So, I left and took about six months off.

At the time, I thought I'd go back to something full-time at a startup. But as soon as I announced that I left Workstream, a bunch of people reached out and wanted consulting, so I decided to take a few projects on.

Here I am two years later — doing the same thing.

Figuring out consulting…

Consulting was a little bit of a shit show from the get-go.

I’d never done anything like it…

I’d never sold my time, I didn't understand how deliverables work.

I have tons of friends that are actual consultants, and I had a very basic understanding of what it was like for them, but I had no clue how to craft an offer and then go to market with it. To be fair, I hadn't anticipated building a business out of it at first. I just had two small customers that were willing to just take a chance on me.

They were willing to pay me something, but also let me test the waters and figure it out as I went.

I was very upfront with them throughout the whole thing, basically saying, “I've never done anything like this, but I think this is how I would structure this.”

I followed Justin Welsh, and that was really helpful. I got some exposure on what to do from him, and I also have a handful of friends that were extremely helpful.

So, as I got a few months into these initial engagements, I started to get a ton of interest from people on LinkedIn. People interested in wanting to do what I was doing, transitioning careers, trying consulting on the side, things like that. And it led me to realize two things:

Number one, there's a ton of demand in consulting.

Number two, there was an enormous group of people that wanted to be able to do what I'm doing. That led to me blogging about the whole thing in public.

I have no problem being an open book about what's working, what isn’t, failures — all the above.

That alone drove a ton of interest on social media as well as lead gen for me, because the more that they liked and shared my blog, the more leads I got from it.

So, after about four months of working with those first couple clients, I thought it was worth trying. My wife and I had twelve months of runway in the bank, and really, the worst case scenario was that it didn’t work and I just went and got a job. So we did it.

We knew that we wanted to hit some certain goals and if we could do that in the first twelve months, then we would keep doing it. And we hit that goal within 90 days, so here we are.

Thoughts on pricing…

I started by breaking it into an hourly rate and comparing it to a full time job.

If I was the VP of sales somewhere, that’d be about 300k a year.

So, what does that come down to? We'll call $150 an hour.

And so I thought, okay, I've got to be doing more than that.

And I just kind of picked a number…

I think I started like $350 and thought, okay, if I do 350 an hour, what am I actually willing to dedicate to a single project each week?

If I'm willing to spend 5 hours a week with one customer, what can I produce in that?

And I learned so much here because I was able to start on the lower end where I was winning every deal, and then slowly increased over the course of my first six months that per-hour rate, until I found more product-market-fit there.

And what I found was that some of my early customers, those deliverables, were really hard to achieve when there weren't existing sales reps in the seat.

And I had to pivot a lot of that into working with customers that have existing sales reps or were immediately hired.

That gave me a lot more leverage to say, okay, I could do 5 hours a week, but I felt more confident we could produce the right metrics necessary to prove or disprove product-market-fit at the stage that we're at.

If anything, there was mismanagement of expectations on my side.

I ended up doing a stupid amount of work on my first couple projects by myself, where my hourly rate was probably $30 an hour, ultimately.

In doing that, I realized the value that I was providing was worth significantly more.

I started comparing it to a junior sales employee — they couldn’t even have hired an SDR to create as much value as me, and that could cost you 50, 60, $70k a year.

How do I price against that?

Thinking that way has helped me completely reframe my offering around building, go-to-market early stages, and what value I can bring comparable to someone they would hire full time.

Buying existing businesses…

I grew up around small business entrepreneurship — my parents acquired and sold a few small businesses when I was a kid…

My dad still owns a small business that does about $20 million a year.

He's retired now, but it was a business that provided for our family my whole life, so I was familiar with the small business world at least, and I always thought that I’d love to try it someday.

I was just searching for deals and I started really wide, looked at everything, and slowly started narrowing toward a thesis.

We made two acquisitions last year, and I think I realized that all of my net worth is tied up in tech.

My publicly held stock is predominantly tech, and my knowledge base tech.

I left the tech world full-time at the peak of it, and it’s gone downhill ever since.

I realized I needed to figure out how to diversify my portfolio outside of tech.

I didn’t have any regrets, I just wasn’t interested in continuing to put my eggs in just tech.

I’m also thinking about my family, and putting them in a good position if I was gone tomorrow, because the reality is, I'm selling my brain right now, and it’s really hard to scale that up.

Ultimately I recognize there are a lot of things that can't be taught — which is what led us to making two acquisitions outside of tech last year.

On picking the right deal…

A year and a half ago, when I started looking, I didn't want employees…

I wanted as much revenue as possible with the least amount of employees or operating expenses.

I wanted it to be as remote as possible.

And, honestly, I just didn't have the balls to buy something huge, so that led to the vending machine business acquisition.

Initially, the types of businesses at the top of my list were car washes, laundromats, and vending machines.

My dad's in car washes, so I know that business model pretty well, but it's damn hard to find a car wash for less than $2 million, and I wasn't willing to spend $2 million.

Laundromats were equally hard to find, and I knew less about them. Then, I stumbled on a vending route that came up for sale here in Salt Lake.

It was one owner, and it was like $200k.

And I thought, I'm totally willing to pay cash for this.

It’s a simple business, I don’t have to leverage it, and I really can't screw it up.

And as I narrowed in on that, I looked at a ton of deals elsewhere.

I looked at everything from $500k gross to $7 million gross with 10% - 40% EBITDA margins.

That was my thesis going into it.

Lessons Learned…

After all was said and done, I ended up buying two small businesses with one employee.

And thank God my wife is willing to run our vending business, because I still run two businesses: I run my consulting business, and this electronics distribution company.

Initially I tried to disprove the idea that buying a $20 million business is the same amount of work, effort, time, and energy as buying a $1 million business, but in hindsight, I think I was wrong.

And I’ll explain why:

There is something to be said about having a few people that know the business or understand what's going on to at least talk with on a regular basis.

My electronics business — it did a million last year and has a 48% operating margin, but I have nobody to talk to about it other than the previous owner.

And the guy's 65 years old and retired, so most of the time, he doesn't want to talk about it.

It's extremely difficult to be you and only you, where nobody else actually knows the inner workings of something in an industry I know nothing about, selling products I know nothing about.

Figuring out where the hell to take this thing is really difficult.

I'm only giving it a fraction of my time because I have another business to run, but this one has debt service. So I got to figure out how to pay for that.

Coming full circle: I understand why people are buying $20-$30M businesses that have infrastructure in place, because I think the same emotional toll that I go through now would be the exact same on a bigger business. I would have a hell of a lot more brains that care about what I'm doing that can share the weight of that burden. Whereas right now, it's just me.

On the electronics business…

It’s a 38-year-old business. At its peak, the owner scaled it to $20M a year with a full team. After a divorce, he scaled it back down and turned it into a lifestyle business.

That gave me confidence—it had scale before, and the market is huge.

The core business?

Selling obsolete electronic components to contract manufacturers.

Think of companies making test and measurement devices—handheld tools that need circuit boards. They don’t manufacture the boards themselves; they outsource it.

Each board has 100+ microchips. If even one gets discontinued—say, by Texas Instruments—that board can’t be produced anymore.

That’s where we come in.

We source excess inventory from companies that over-ordered, buy those components at a discount, and resell them to manufacturers who still need them.

Top-line last year was $450K. This year, slower—likely ending around $400K.

Gross margins are down a little bit, not a ton.

But the first six months of the year, the five biggest customers we have — which have also been our biggest customers for the last six years straight — our main contacts retired.

That kicked my ass — when those contacts retire, we're technically in the database as a supplier, but when they get backfilled, new employees bring their old relationships and we often get cut out.

I have no other contacts in a lot of these businesses, because the guy who took it over had 90% of the business in his head and the rest was in QuickBooks. I could only see and have access to who he was sending invoices to, so it made it extremely difficult to see anyone else that he had any sort of contact with — every single one of which required an enormous amount of prospecting on my side.

Add to that, I don't have a ton of time to figure it all out, because I'm trying to run a consulting business to pay for all this shit.

It has been a brutal year.

I have been fortunate to talk to some other business owners that are going through the exact same thing and a lot of them say it's been the worst in the last 18 years.

This industry's wildly susceptible to election years, where a lot of these large manufacturers are just pausing and holding until they see what's going on.

We're not out of business, so that's a win.

I don't think we'll be out of business anytime soon, but I'm finally to the point where I understand the business enough to have a slight degree of confidence of where to go next.

Everyone talks about acquiring businesses from someone retiring, but the idea their clients would be retiring too never even crossed my mind.

Reflections on solopreneurship…

I spent a lot of time being very bitter about being an employee — feeling like I got taken advantage of. I think some of my feelings are still valid there, especially now realizing that my stock is probably worth nothing.

I think a lot of people experience that.

But there is something to be said clocking in and out — I don't believe everyone has to be an entrepreneur. People talk as if everyone should be one, and I think that’s completely wrong. Most people are not cut out to do it, and that's okay.

I respect the hell out of people that are actually okay with working 40 hours a week and just satisfied with that. I envy it often, and especially this year because I have this idea of what I want to build for my family. And right now, I hope it happens…

But a hope doesn't confidently get me there. A job might! laughs

I think a lot of the business content out there led me to believe that the path to retirement was to go buy a small business and I would be retired.

Don't get me wrong, I have a ton of freedom.

I don't have to answer to anyone…

That alone makes it worth it for me.

But there's something about being an entrepreneur, and literally not knowing what more than three months ahead of you looks like — financially, emotionally, physically.

You don't know what you're going to be doing in three months, and that is so fucking scary.

And I don't know if you ever get past that.

I can't see past it at this point, having done it for two years.

To sum that up — I think my assumptions were wrong that this was the path to retire early.

The second point that I want to make is that I thought that buying a business outside of tech was the right way to go.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I would still buy a vending business.

It's easy.

But if I took a million dollars and dumped it into a small software company, I would have a hundred times more confidence in knowing what to do and what levers to pull.

In my ignorance, I thought that go-to-market or understanding sales was horizontal across every industry. I'm embarrassed to say at 34 years old that that is so far from the truth.

I am in the thick of learning that if I would have poured the energy and emotional effort and time into a million-dollar acquisition for a software business, I would probably be in a much different spot.

Right now, my network is in tech, my network is in software. And to some extent I took what I built over the course of twelve years and I set it aside completely.

I would never do that again—big lesson learned.

I'm now in a state of starting to go back to that drawing board to some extent and say, can I use this network for this business? And how the hell do I do that?

It’s not like my target customer is on Apollo — it’s a completely different game, so in a lot of ways I'm building up from zero.

Staying in your zone of competency — Alex Hormozi talks about all the time.

The first time I listened to that, I wanted to punch him in the face...

Now I feel like an idiot.

I spent twelve years learning a skill and thought it was transferable into any industry, and I could not have been more wrong.

And it’s been challenging to the point where at times, I just want to block everyone and everything out.

The last thing I want to do is fucking talk to other people.

I've had to really force myself to because I know I'm not the only one.

And until you're an entrepreneur and you've done the shit, it's hard to relate to.

I hadn't spent enough of my earlier career, pre entrepreneur, talking with entrepreneurs in that stage because I wasn't in that realm.

I wasn't in the arena.

And now it's, like, really validating to talk with people in the arena every day.

On what’s working…

I think the biggest victory is the fact that because my wife and I own a portfolio of small businesses, we can afford one to get its ass kicked for a while.

It's kept us running and allowed us to be able to iterate without having to do anything crazy financially.

Thank God that's worked.

I think building in public has worked extremely well for me, and I continue to learn that lesson again and again. I didn't do it for any selfish reason other than people seemed interested and I was willing to share.

I've been doing it for two years, and I'm just starting to recognize that I can actually use it to my benefit.

A lot of my audience is willing to share my content, and I'm getting connected to people that know these industries a hell of a lot better.

This year has been about focusing on me and figuring my shit out.

Because, in reality, success is not a great teacher.

And I've had a shit ton of success in my tech career.

What all this has taught me is that if I can't take care of my own self, our businesses are dead and I need to learn how to work better, and take care of my mental and physical health, or it's all gone and none of this mattered.

On building a portfolio…

I wish I would have just given a little bit more thought to having a portfolio of businesses which can work together — like what shared services we can have across the portfolio.

Whether it's like chips that are getting distributed or microchips, we're starting to marry those two and they're slowly coming together.

But it's a stretch right now.

I would say most of the stuff I've tried or been thinking about is more agency adjacent.

Stuff that I could build in addition to consulting as a value-added service.

That being said, a lot of it would require more people and just more time spent consulting — and I enjoy consulting — but I don't really want to grow that business.

I want to just keep it steady.

And really, knowing what I know now, I probably would have doubled down on vending.

But the thing that concerned me about vending was that the average vending location does $300-$500 a month, gross.

That's great, but it means that you need an enormous amount of volume in order to scale. It can be done, but I believe that there is a faster path to higher ticket items.

To be fair, the margin is pretty hard to beat vending.

We're about 50% operating margin, so it's pretty damn good, but still.

I actually think that if I could rewind twelve months, I probably would have doubled down because there's adjacent services that I believe vending can turn into.

We're exploring a larger distribution model in vending where we’d take our existing infrastructure and build it into an e-commerce brand to some extent — infrastructure we have from shipping and warehousing.

If I dedicate the time and effort to do that, we could build something pretty interesting.

But I don't have the time and energy right now… laughs

On finding customers…

Right now, I have a hunch about what’s working—like the onsite visits.

I didn’t try that until two months ago, and within 90 days, I got $30k in purchase orders from a net new customer after going onsite. It cost me about $600 to fly out there, knock on doors, and hustle. I mean, I was scrappy—eating tuna packets in the rental car, just trying to make it work.

It was a shot in the dark.

I had no idea if it would work or be a total waste of time. Spent 18 hours figuring it out, and even though it worked, I’m hesitant to do it again.

Maybe it’s a timing thing. Maybe I just don’t want to.

I know I should go local, knock on doors, put in the hours. But the thought of spending 12 hours doing that instead of consulting—where I know I’ll make money—feels overwhelming.

Cold-calling old customers? A grind. The lists are outdated, contacts are gone, and I’m chasing people who don’t know me. I’ve outsourced parts of it, but at the end of the day, it’s on me.

And that’s the hardest part. The unknown.

I have no clue if this will pay off. I just keep showing up and hoping consistency wins.

Maybe that’s just entrepreneurship. Betting on yourself and doing the work, even when you don’t know if it’ll work.

At the end of the day, I own my calendar. That’s what I signed up for.

That freedom is what I’ve always wanted.

If this is the price I have to pay for it, so be it.

No regrets.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

Share The Come Up

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

  Thanks for reading The Come Up! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This week, we’re spotlighting a conversation from late 2024 with Dave Galloway — a DJ-turned-entrepreneur who in addition to running an events business launched a thriving portable toilet rental business.

If you’re someone who loves hearing about unconventional entrepreneurial paths, you won’t want to miss this one — dive in below!

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Alpha Sanitation Quick Stats:

📅 Time in business: < two months
🚽 Number of toilets: 36
📦 Number of toilets on the way: 28
💵 Average revenue per toilet per month: ~$200
⚙️ Cost per toilet: $1200
🏦 Financing: $100,000
📈 MRR: $7200

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Before Alpha Sanitation & pivoting…

Alpha Sanitation is portable toilet rentals for special events — fairs, festivals, things like that.

Basically, anywhere that you would need a portable toilet outside, that's what we do.

I come from the events world, primarily as a DJ and talent booker, and while it’s a great business, I was always searching for other avenues to create revenue.

I’ve spent a ton of time in the entrepreneurship world, and I've always looked for new ideas.

Right now, all people talk about are creating courses, seminars, online products, and SaaS.

Nobody's really talking about this very antiquated industry — sanitation.

I was on all these thought leader email lists, attended business seminars, and listened to podcasts, but I just didn’t see myself in that world.

So, I started to look at other things…

Early on, DJing weddings played into my thinking a lot…

I’ve performed at a ton of them, and I knew there was value there, because weddings are just something that happens every single day all across the globe.

I never wanted to build something and have to convince people they need it.

So, I thought, why don’t I jump into a world of products where there’s already a clear need?

And I guess ever since I was able to get the DJ and entertainment business to a sustainable size — where it can run whether or not I’m involved in it — I've always been looking at ways to grow it.

We added photo booths and a couple other things, which were great for special events and weddings — there just wasn't a great enough demand.

So, I started to look around to other spaces and say, if my goal is to continue growing either this company or start a new company and grow that company, what would be another avenue to do that?

The more I looked into it, the more I realized there's not a ton of crossover into the actual DJ business.

We do special events, we work with the same people who book toilets on the other end of these events, so there were some relationships I could leverage, but ultimately it was just me saying, if my goal is growth and I've hit a ceiling on the DJ side of it, what are some other things that we can do?

Of course, going into toilets was a side step for sure. But the deeper I get into it, the more I realize that there actually is a lot of crossover.

From 0 to 1…

I didn't know going into it, but in terms of kind of taking the idea and executing it, there were a few checkboxes that I absolutely needed to have on the list.

It needed to be something that was scalable but could be started by one person — me, basically. I can't take all the credit, though…my 11 year old son is out there helping me every week. laughs

The idea, of course, is that eventually we're not the ones out there doing this every week. I’d like to get to a point where we can hire operators and drivers and other people to run the back end and then I can just oversee it. That’s the hope, at least.

To go from ideation to actual execution, it was more paperwork than you could ever imagine.

Probably more paperwork than I filled out in the 20 cumulative years of being a DJ.

As it turns out, there's a lot of environmental approvals, licensing, permits and permissions involved in this. Even the insurance part of this alone is huge. Two months of insurance payments are more than I pay all year on the DJ side of things.

And a big drawback of this sanitation business, I've realized, is I can't even acquire a single new customer without acquiring more capital first. But that's the nature of how this industry works.

So — there was a huge learning curve in the beginning. It was just kind of me sweating my way through that and filling out endless PDFs at my desk by myself. Thankfully, I had some great guidance from one of the suppliers that I work with. They were able to point me on the right track in a lot of areas.

The one thing that I did find very interesting — in the beginning, I thought it was going to take months of research to fully evaluate whether or not I should pursue it as a business.

Truthfully, I figured out I could learn 90% of what I need to get started in about two days, then I just made up a list of questions and took them to some people I know and we'll go from there.

The whole thing reminded me of that book, “the one page marketing plan” — you can spend months on the perfect proposal and market research, or you could start with the absolute essentials instead of trying to map out the next 300 steps.

On funding…

I started with a little bit of my own savings, and then I got a loan from the Business Development Bank of Canada, which I've got to say that's probably the easiest bank I've ever worked with in my entire life.

I went to their website, filled out a form, supplied some numbers from my existing business and the loan came through in about a week or so — for a hundred thousand dollars.

That's what I used to buy my startup equipment.

So, I guess the answer is all for less than $100,000 you can get this thing up and running.

It's still too early to predict, but with the interest that we've gotten and the contracts that we've set up for the next calendar year… I don't think it's crazy to suggest that we could break six figures in the first 12 months.

That doesn't necessarily mean I can repay that whole loan faster than I plan to, but I think it definitely puts me in a really good position to suggest everything about this is sustainable and profitable.

On creating something scalable…

The biggest challenge to scaling the DJ business was key man risk.

There are very few artists that have managed to build a brand that's scalable without them being at a specific location at a specific time, but it’s still frustrating — I have a remarkable team of DJs, but it constantly comes down to clients saying, well we are interested in having YOU at our event and if you're not available, we're just not interested.

Outsourcing in the DJ business is VERY tough.

That kind of inflexibility to scale was definitely one of the motivators for the sanitation company.

I wanted something scalable, and sustainable, too.

Because think of it this way: DJs don’t have an incredibly long shelf life, either. You’d have to be a truly legendary performer to still be getting gigs into your 50s and 60s.

Cultivating a business mindset…

I never did well in high school — until I got into Grade 11, where you can start actually picking your courses instead of just taking mandatory ones.

I started to pick a few business courses simply for the sake of trying something new.

And I remember, I took this marketing course, and it was the first time ever I started to get great marks. All my other courses were just Ds — maybe Cs if I was lucky — but in this marketing class I was maintaining an average of 100% the whole year. And I was like, I can do THIS.

From there, I took marketing at Fanshawe College in London (Ontario). I enjoyed that experience so much that when I was done, I went back and got another diploma. Then I got out into the real world.

I spent time in pharmaceutical sales and paper sales, and I was able to really learn a lot, but, ultimately, I love reading and I love podcasts. And there were a couple interesting things that I picked up literally just in the last 12 to 24 months that really instilled a certain mindset.

My family and I went down to Disney over Christmas last year.

When we were driving back, we passed through this oceanside town. I don’t remember the name, but there were all these cottages along the water, and it was just road after road of these beautiful cottages.

We started looking some of them up, and I think the cheapest one was $6 million.

And something just struck me then.

I just asked myself, how did all these people do it?

My guess is that a few of them did it by crawling their way up the corporate ladder. Some of them are probably the product of generational wealth. But regardless, as we were leaving that community, I was like, why can't anybody do this?

It really inspired me to say, if I'm going to make the move to have the kind of lifestyle that I want. Like, how much longer should I be waiting on this?

The first part was realizing that I didn't really need anyone’s permission to start.

But another thing came from Gary Vaynerchuk: He basically said, eventually, you have to stop consuming and start doing shit.

That was it for me.

I'd listened to literally tens of thousands of hours of podcasts over the last few years, but I hadn’t really started doing shit.

It was good to learn, but I realized there wasn’t much of a legacy there.

Would I rather be this guy who consumed more stuff than anybody in the world, or be the person who built things that didn’t exist before?

Landing first customers…

It's funny because I'd reached out to a couple people and just said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this to get a better understanding of how things work.

And granted, this was only from a handful of people, but all of them said the same thing — people weren’t happy with their existing service provider.

I’d worked with some of them for over a decade, so they just went, assuming you're bringing the same pedigree to this business that I hold you to in the other business, then it's a yes.

All told — I had two customers who said yes before I had even purchased anything, so that really gave me a spark of belief that it was feasible.

The other thing was that the entertainment — special events — aspect of it was just one side of the business. There was the construction world to dive into as well.

As it happens, I have a cousin and a family friend who work in construction. They're custom home builders. And I just asked them about the space.

Where do you get these things from?
How does this work?

Luckily, those conversations ended with them telling me that they’d support me if I did it, so I promised to give them a deal, and they said they’d be able to spread the word.

From there, I approached a couple other people, and basically said, hey, this is what I’m doing — would you consider it?

They basically said: we’ll have you do some of our smaller events, and if you don’t mess it up, we’ll give you the rest. Which was totally understandable.

On business development and scaling…

My whole plan for outbound was to cold call places that I knew used these things.

But I didn’t want to start doing it immediately.

I wanted to make my mistakes on some of the smaller clients so I could refine this process before I pitched some national or global construction companies,

Some of them I have absolutely no connection with, so I was literally looking up emails and phone numbers on their website and calling and asking who I should speak with.

Very old-school, boots-on-the-ground type stuff.

The first night, I sent out about 200 emails, and I think I got eight back — including a couple people who told me not to email them again. That's the nature of sales, I guess.

All that said — the bottleneck for me isn’t outbound sales.

My original game plan was to knock on doors all day every day until I could really get this thing flying, but it didn’t take me long to realize the number of toilets I have available is the limiting factor.

All of the ones I have are currently in use, and I don’t necessarily have the capital to buy more, so I can’t really go knock on doors and get a contract for 30 units when I won’t have 30 units available for at least a few weeks.

The ideal state is that I have access to a line of credit and I can order as needed.

Luckily, I don't have a big looming bill that I need to pay back every month. However, the thing that is holding me back from saying let's really dial up these sales is just the ability to get more toilets. I’ve maxed out my current capital access, so I’m a little stuck in that regard.

2025 plans…

My number one thing that I want to achieve in 2025 is to have a proper yard to store these units. Right now I literally have a friend who offered his space on the condition I find my own space in the interim, which I currently am — but it’s a process with a ton of variables.

I live in a rural community, so in a perfect world, I can find some sort of family or friend connection to a farmer who has an acre that they can parse off and sell to me. The rest of it is infrastructure.

The thought of building my own shop to be able to take care of the back end of the business is also part of the goal, but right now, it’s basically land leasing, land purchasing, and then eventually, infrastructure building.

I don't see how it's not capital intensive for at least three years.

But as long as I can keep generating enough of that monthly recurring revenue to keep my head above water, that's good enough for me.

I'm not looking to cash out on this anytime soon.

Biggest challenges…

Originally, I thought my biggest challenge would be staffing, considering the nature of the work.

Surprisingly, that hasn’t been an issue. I've had a few people who've just put up their hand and said, this is gross, but do it. They just have a hustler's mindset where they're like, you know, to them money is money.

I'm comfortable taking on the initial loan and using my personal savings.

I haven’t reached the point of taking on more debt, and I think I have a little ways to go, but that’ll definitely bring its own set of challenges.

A friend of mine said something funny about it all the other day.

He was like, “it's all just ones and zeros anyway…”

You start, and all the ones and zeros will be in the negative, and then you just work hard to reduce a decimal every month and try to get it in the positive, and that's it.

As long as your stomach can handle looking at the bank account and seeing that it’s in the negative, that’s the important thing, because you’re moving towards the positive.

Really, when it comes down to it, all we're doing is just betting on ourselves, right?

Managing routes…

Right now my route varies.

I can hit about 12 toilets in a single morning because they all happen to be in these three small towns that are all pretty close to each other. For some of the other ones it's like an hour there and an hour back, so each day looks pretty different.

But — I can tell you right now that I can service these 36 toilets in two days by myself. So if I was to work with a partner — not to say my 11 year old isn't a great partner, but he's not always the fastest worker — I think we could move through that even quicker.

An interesting contrast between sanitation and my events experience is the time sensitive nature.

In events, fulfillment is almost always time-specific.

It's very much, doors open at 5:00 or you're on stage at 7:05. If you're not there at 7:05, that's it, you failed and you're probably not coming back.

By contrast, in the toilet world, the bar is very low. It's basically just, keep this thing clean.

Whether I show up at 7am or 7pm any day of the week to do that, nobody seems to care.

I really like that flexibility, but I'm currently right on the threshold of answering the question of, do I want to clean toilets seven days a week, or is this a good time to start bringing in somebody else?

Either way, about two days a week I can get everything done and clean and that's with transportation time.

On competitors…

As I was getting this going, I realized — much more so than with my other business — people won't just buy from you to buy from you. You have to come with some sort of value proposition that makes sense for them, and there are typically only three, right?

Availability, price, or service.

There are a lot of nuances to that, I think those three umbrellas probably capture 99% of the reasoning behind why people buy a given product or service. So, leveraging those existing relationships, which I would put under the service category, proved to work really well for me.

Competition-wise, there’s nobody operating within 50 Kilometres of me, so staying as local as possible is key.

In terms of scaling it up from there, that's when I see some possible difficulties. My biggest fear, of course, is that some of these competitors — who have thousands of units, and could crush me, basically — are gonna start saying, we’re going to beat any price our competitors put out, and make it a race to the bottom.

I'm not looking to do that.

I'm going to try to continue to leverage relationships because that's always served me very well.

Currently our prices are very, very fair, and I don't think it's a sustainable business model beyond a few years because I don’t want to be a price cutter. I want to come in and be a true competitor because I think that’s what’s best for the industry.

It’s what I did in DJing — believing we all deserve more, and pricing competitively enough that everyone’s standard is raised.

Long-term plans…

That's really the biggest question mark right now.

My dream is to be able to solely focus on the growth of the company, so I'd love to get myself in a position where I’m just out there knocking on doors and shaking hands.

At the same time, as I learn more about operations and on-site activities, I want to develop a really broad knowledge base so that if there's ever an emergency, it's not like, well, don't call Dave because he doesn't know what to do.

I met a guy from Pennsylvania last week who's got over a thousand units, a dozen trucks, and about 25 people that work for the company full time.

I think that’s a nice benchmark to aim for.

I just don't have a timeline…

Is that a three year plan?
Is that a ten year plan?

We'll find out.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

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• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

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This week, we’re diving into the archives to revisit a conversation from Spring 2024 with Jon DeCoste — an entrepreneur who left a thriving engineering and sales career to pursue his dream of owning a business.

At the time, Jon was deep into the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) process — a unique approach where entrepreneurs buy an existing business instead of starting one from scratch. Jon navigated the highs and lows of self-funded entrepreneurship, balancing risk, resilience, and opportunity.

Spoiler alert: in December 2024, he successfully acquired a fantastic Alberta-based business that checked all his boxes!

Jon’s journey is filled with valuable insights, including:

• How to stay focused and resilient in a self-funded search

• The importance of aligning your goals with the right opportunities

• Lessons learned from evaluating hundreds of businesses

This one’s a must-read for anyone interested in business acquisition — check it out below!

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Quick Stats:

• 💰 Target EBITDA: $750,000–$4M

• 🌍 Target Region: Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan

• 🏗️ Target Industry: Oil & Gas, Industrial, Manufacturing, Distribution, and Services

• ✉️ LOIs Sent: 4

• 📞 Business Owners Spoken To: >400

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How He Got Here…

I'm definitely the guy who changed things up mid-career, although it wasn't overnight — it was a progression.

I’ll give you a bit of history, though.

I came out of Dalhousie with a mechanical engineering degree, and was introduced to the oil and gas industry.

Being from the Maritimes, I wasn't that tuned in to what was happening out in Alberta at that time, but I got a job and worked on the rigs as an engineer.

I spent about five and a half years with large Canadian midstream businesses doing a bunch of different roles — some technical, some commercial, and that's where I ended up doing an MBA specialization in entrepreneurship ~ I am grateful Mick Dillger, at the time VP of my business unit, for supporting my MBA which I believe helped in executing some huge wins for the business. During this time I really had that itch to start something myself.

I did some business consulting, started a tech company — which was a disaster — but still a fun journey and invested in some startups as well.

In a nutshell, that’s what I did before the current adventure that I'm on.

Shifting to entrepreneurship…

I'm just not the typical engineer, if there's such a thing. With my generation, the options were like, be a doctor, an engineer, get a business degree, or go into the trades. I liked to build things, so engineering seemed like the best choice.

There was lots of opportunity, and the path was laid out very nicely. There’s always upward mobility, but there was something more that I had an itch for: people dynamics.

When I was early in my career, I used to look at salespeople and think,

Oh man, they're pushy, have fake charm, and make false promises
They're just going out and drinking beers and trying to persuade people…
I'm never going to be that…

Luckily, I was shown over a period of time what sales really was.

It's helping people solve a problem to make their future lives better than the current state — better measured by their values and perspective. Sophisticated sales is more psychology than anything else. There’s lots of strategy involved, and I find it very interesting.

I think that's just where the draw came from. I was just more interested in that than doing calculations.

At 38, I woke up and kind of said, this career has been awesome…you keep hitting new highs, and every time you hit the goal, you’re making more money, but shortly after, it’s kind of empty, right?

I thought it was time to maybe step back and take a little bit more of a purposeful step forward in the second half of my career.

Past failures…

Back in 2013, I had an idea from my MBA around short-term labor markets and people having side hustles.

So we tested that out, had some conversations, and there was some demand. Then, during a startup weekend, we got together with seven people and started to build a MVP. Four of us stuck around after that.

We did all the wrong things with some great potential in between. We had a brilliant programmer who did all the tech work, and we had maybe 100 users on the application, so it was working, technically. But the four of us had a conversation, like, Alright, where are we taking this?

And there were four different answers.

Interesting side note: I think in Austin, Texas, there was a company called Rig Up — maybe they've been acquired by now — but the foundation of what they built was exactly what our use case was, and I think they turned into a multi-billion dollar business.

At one point it was like, Shit, we really should have stuck with that.

But obviously, there's no way of knowing whether or not things would turn out the same way, and likely not as there are many challenges and some luck in going from zero to one.

Finding the right opportunities…

So there are different ways to go about buying a business. There is the funded avenue, meaning you’re backed by some type of private equity firm or equivalent, , and there's ‘self-search’, where you don't necessarily have funding behind you.

When you’re a self-searcher, you have no salary — you’re out of pocket on all expenses for search process and you're also putting up the money to buy a business.

When I started this, I did an assessment, looked at all the different options, and self-search just fit my personality and goals better.

I was fortunate to have some dollars saved— which now I've spent a bunch because I've been doing this for a while — but I think it was ultimately the right choice.

There are a lot of down periods, so it’s great if you have a support system in place that can pick you up and say, Hey, head up, keep going. You've got more to do here.

The funded approach usually has that, and also things like a team of advisors that are there on a bench waiting to support you — legal, accounting, and subject matter experts.

And typically, when you’re going the funded route, you’re also getting paid a stipend while you search. It’s not a huge amount of money, but you’re getting paid for the 18-24 months that you’re usually given to find something.

So yeah, there are some pretty clear advantages going that route.

You have more security when you’re funded, but that security comes with sacrificing a degree of freedom. If you’re doing a self-search — you just do it your way.

With self-search, at the end of the day, whether things go good or go bad, you get to look in the mirror and know that you own it.

My advice, take your time in evaluating what route works best for you. Not what I chose, not what your peers chose, but what fit with what you want to get out of this journey.

Make no mistake, this journey will challenge you and has many decisions that are ‘one-door’, as Bezos defines them.

Knowing when to move forward…

When I left my last business, within the first week, I was running around taking meetings, and there were several people in my network that were like, JD, chill out, man. How often in the middle of your career do you get to take a break?

That had a big impact on me.

After that, I slowed down, and focused on just learning as much as I physically could about ETA, so that’s what I committed to for the first three months last summer — not working, no real timeline, just learning and revisiting my purpose, goals, and vision of the future.

From there, I divided up the savings I had and designated a certain amount as my “Investment Pot” — stuff I can’t touch until a business is found.

Then, with my remaining savings, I essentially looked at how much money I had, and then I said, alright, what's my runway to be able to live life as we currently do?

It was about 14 months. So I knew my runway.

After looking at the data from searchers over the past decades, it looked like it should take me no more than 24 months to buy a business. But I don't have 24 months. I have twelve.

Nothing better than a little pressure to keep one focused on a task. laughs

Daily habits & process…

The first thing I realized was that there's no way I was going to be successful if I was going to do it just by myself. Sure, I am the driving force behind it, but several people are helping me along the way.

Starting out, it was identifying brokers and M&A advisors that deal flow could come from.

After that, I started to network with bankers, largely because I knew I was going to need senior debt to finance a deal.

Generally, bankers aren't that interested in chatting with you before you have a deal.

And it makes sense—they can't talk to everybody.

There's a small percentage of people who are ever going to come with a transaction.

That being said, everyone I reached out to and met with was extremely gracious with their time.

Essentially, what I was trying to do was give them a download of who I am and that I am committed to this journey. I also do check-ins every so often. The idea is that when it finally comes time, I can call Benito at BDC or whichever bank it is and tell them that I have a deal, they've got some context to keep things moving.

Once you've done those rounds and know who you need to be connected with — who to send regular or frequent updates to — then it's time to focus on deal flow. You virtually forget about everything else.

That's really where all my time was spent during prospecting. It’s a matter of reaching out to brokers frequently, looking at their websites, and seeing the deals that they're posting. There are also deals that don't get posted online, and those are the ones where it takes a little bit of time and connections to tap into.

A lot of the work goes into proprietary outreach — which is a huge conversation in itself — but it's essentially going out and cold calling and emailing people. Usually, you’ll try to connect with someone around eight times before you move on.

It's a lot of conversations with people. I haven't looked at my stats for that in a while, but they're huge. The emails aren't even worth counting, I just focus on the calls that I have and in-person meetings, because those are the valuable ones.

The big key to outreach is that it multiplies on itself. Every time you go for a coffee, or have lunch with a prospect, or even have a phone call — you can get an introduction to somebody else, and then it builds and builds.

All of a sudden, you have a great problem: you don’t have enough time to do all of it — to have conversations with everybody.

Qualifying a ‘good’ business to buy…

The company profile has developed over time.

When I started, I was very broad. I was looking at $1 million or $5 million EBITDA across Canada, and the list of business types I wouldn’t look at was short.

For a while I would tell people I was agnostic to type of business however that was a mistake - telling people you are agnostic in the business you are looking for is about as valuable as having them guess as to what you’re looking for - thanks for the lesson Brenda.

There's a sweet spot where the opportunities come, in my opinion. It's around $950,000 EBITDA up to about $2.5M, where I just see a lot of businesses that have a lot of potential and a lot of value.

The focus now is on Western Canada, ideally within 3 hours of home.

No matter what business I end up acquiring, the first year, I expect to be at their operations the majority of the time. From an interest perspective, the number one priority is the people dynamic. I'm going to be an operator, not just an investor, so I need to be in there, connecting with people and learning from them.

My perspective is that the numbers are important but they only tell a fraction of the story about the business. Once you determine the numbers work, focus on the people, stories, culture, and impact the business has had - the difference between good and great businesses live here.

But generally, after a year, I’ll be looking at, how do I move from working in the business to working on the business?

Obviously, in Alberta, there's a pretty good chance you're going to find a business that is involved with oil and gas. There's always cycles within oil and gas, boom and bust, so if you're looking at a business and they have a high contribution of their revenue coming from oil and gas, that's something I want to be aware of.

It doesn't scare me away, but I want to be able to identify what my plan would be to diversify that revenue stream. So if they have say 90% of revenue coming from oil and gas, how do I get down to 50? If I can't see that, if they have a product or a service that can't be adapted to another industry, that's a no-go.

But don’t get me wrong, my career has been rooted in Energy, and I remain long on Canadian and USA Oil & Gas. While the industry seems to face an ever-growing ledger of challenges and criticisms—whether valid or not—all I see are opportunities for businesses and individuals willing to embrace the challenge.

Maybe it’s my fascination with the grit and resilience of Wildcatters, or my early career days working on the rigs in Zama City, but I don’t think the industry is on its way out.

In fact, I believe it’s ripe for innovation.

Value-add vs. solid businesses…

Some people approach it with the idea of getting a smoking deal. Finding an owner that doesn't know what they've got and buying it. I want to buy a business for market value and think it's the smart way to do it.

I want the Sellers, six months after closing day, after the transition, to still look back and go, that was a good value.

It's going to be different for different opportunities, but I expect to have a good transition and relationship with the seller even beyond that transition period of the business.

If I can find a business that doesn't have a sales team or function, but they've been growing, or they've been around for say 30 years, that is brilliant.

You have to dig more into it, but there's a great opportunity there.

Fears & worst case scenarios…

What scares me are the unknown unknowns — and there's nothing I can do about those, so I don't let it keep me up.

One thing that kind of freaks me out: let's say I find a business, it checks all the boxes, but they've got this industry revenue contribution risk or customer concentration risk — so a lot of the revenue comes from an industry or a small set of customers.

I look at that and say, how quickly can I find the solution?
How can I reduce that exposure?
By building up sales in other parts of the business?
How quickly can I do that?

And what is the likeliness of a downward cycle happening before I can get there?

Starting a business vs. buying…

To over-generalize, there are three paths: One is to get a corporate job. That's deemed extremely safe, even though there is always a risk that is typically understated.

Another option is to go to a startup, and with doing that, you're swinging for the fences. You're going for the big outcome, but it’s extremely risky. I think 96% of startups fail, and of the 4% that don’t, 98% of them never get to a million dollars of revenue.

I wish I would have read something like that earlier in my career.

Going the buy-then-build route, it is less risky. But there's still risk to it. Sure there are some brutally bad outcomes, but any upside in life also has risks associated with it.

The individual needs to ensure the risk and reward fit them.

Newton’s First Law — an object in motion stays in motion…

A business that's been around for 20 years has usually gone through several cycles, and it's probably going to stick around as long as you don't screw it up.

There are caveats to that, but that's how I think about it.

Lessons learned…

The only way I was going to make sure I got this done was to put pressure and hurt in the process for me. To see my bank account every month with nothing going in. And even like the psychology of going, Jon, you've been “out of work” now for twelve months, what the heck are you doing?

Just being my own biggest critic.

There are pros and cons to that for sure — but I needed that pressure, and I've been able to do a lot of work and learn so much by doing that. The amount of knowledge and insight I can give to other people on this journey, compared to where I was even six months ago, is crazy.

Would I have been able to do that while I was focused on another job?

There's no way.

I think for other people it can work, especially if you've got constraints on what you're looking for, but for me, it wouldn’t.

Part of this is really getting in tune with what you are good at — defining what is that thing that you're just obnoxiously great at, and then making sure that whatever it is, you leverage it at the core of that business or that opportunity.

Best & worst parts…

The best part of this whole process is that I'm feeling confident I will find and close on a business in 2024. I won't share a bunch of details now, but things are going well, and I’m extremely excited.

I've made a bunch of phenomenal friends on this journey thus far and that's going to blossom into something awesome over the next years and decades.

Then there’s the learning…

The process of buying a business provides you with so many learnings that can apply to business and life in general.

The downsides… Man, there are dark days.

If you are doing this as a self searcher and you're at your home office and you get those dark days, it’s hard to get through them. I underestimated how tough those are.

The best thing is to surround yourself with people that are on this journey, some earlier than you, some that are ahead of you.

Also, make sure you're doing everything that you want to do in your daily life, just like you would when you're running your business.

Think of it as a marathon without a finish line.

That’s it for this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

Share The Come Up

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

After 2 years of producing content, we’re hoping you would fill out a 30-second reader survey — we don’t normally ask for anything from you, but consider it an early Christmas present!

It will go a LONG way in helping us produce better interviews and content!

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Last quarter, I decided I’m going to begin sharing the journey of scaling out the publication.

It’s inspiring for all these business owners to share their stories, so I figured, it was only right that we share some behind the scenes too.

If you’re new here, you should start by reading our letter from the editor, or my last quarterly update on how & why I started the publication. With that said…

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The 2024 End of Year Update

Refining Process…

I previously wrote about how process was the biggest focus in 2024, but it turns out, there was still a lot of work to do in creating and documenting a REALLY thorough process so nothing slipped through the cracks.

Angus has been invaluable as an editor, but there are so many more tasks involved in the process, including building a strong pipeline for entrepreneurs to interview, executing on our growth strategy, and creating the social media assets for each issue.

Taking full blame, we still hit production delays in Q4, as Angus would rush to get something done, only to have to wait a few days for me to get back to him, as I was busy juggling multiple client projects.

In order to tackle this, I mapped out every single task that needs to be completed to produce a single issue (hint: there’s almost 30 of them) and creating a “how-to” walkthrough video for any task that we aren’t able to automate.

We’re just about ready to bring on a project manager to make sure there are never any production delays and things don’t slip through the cracks.

Growth…

I’m wrapping the year early for the holidays, so these numbers don’t account for the back half of December, but to date, growth has remained strong — averaging 13.19% month-over-month.

Even with fewer interviews published than planned, each issue brought in more new subscribers on average.

We didn’t hit a full calendar of interviews, but the numbers show growth continued regardless — a solid finish to the year.

Brand Overhaul…

You may have noticed an updated look, as we put in an effort to improve the visual assets behind our brand.

To date, everything had been done myself, and while I actually got great feedback from every designer I spoke to saying it was “the best brand design by an amateur they’d ever seen”, it was time to bring in the pros.

I’m really excited by the new logo and font as it’s a better visual representation of who we are - we also got rid of the ugly yellow-ish off-white for a more refined colour palette.

We also sprung for our own URL - thecomeup.co!

I’ve been wanting to ditch the substack URL for months now, but once I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the domain (~$300), I got hit with another unexpected $75 one-time fee from Substack to allow for a custom domain.

Not a deal breaker, but one of those things I would’ve preferred to know in advance as at times it feels like death by 1000 paper cuts!

Maybe you think these details don’t matter...

It can certainly be tough to rationalize the investment, when you’re still struggling to get content out and there’s no revenue being generated.

Every now and then have moments where I lose confidence and want to scrap the whole project, but I’m still just trying to subscribe to the 1% better philosophy and breaking things down piece by piece and zooming out to take a long term approach..

And really, I think all these details compound over time, and hopefully makes it look a bit more legitimate, so that when we reach out to business owners cold, they see we’re not some fly-by-night operation.

We still have work to do — like updating homepage images and improving content tags for company type to make navigation cleaner. But we’re on the right track!

Social Media…

TBH - this is another area I’m disappointed in, mostly that we didn’t get the machine up and running. That said, everything always takes longer than you think.

Maybe it was overly ambitious to try to:

1. find a designer

2. revamp the brand

3. create templates for evergreen content

4. get revisions

5. launch a full content calendar of evergreen content all in one quarter.

Just getting the templates was a big win — they’re simple, but do the combined job of featuring the business owner, highlighting some of their insights and promoting the publication as well.

Here’s an example of what the V1 carousels will look like for Instagram & LinkedIn:

Now that these exist, it’ll be a lot easier to have someone create one template per issue, without having to go down a creative rabbit hole every time.

What do you think of the new carousels? LMK!

And with that said—if you have any feedback on how we can improve our content please let me know.

You can always respond to this newsletter or reach out to me directly!

That’s the update—hope you have a great holiday season.

Thank you for being part of this journey — your support and feedback mean everything as we keep building. Here’s to a big 2025!

Fill out the survey!

Share The Come Up

This week, we’re featuring Mike Fata — co-founder of Manitoba Harvest and a three-time nine-figure exit entrepreneur.

Since then, he’s gone on to invest in and advise for some amazing brands, including Mid-Day Squares, Sol Cuisine, and Dream Pops.

From growing up with humble beginnings to building one of the most recognized hemp food brands in the world, his story is packed with hard-earned lessons and insights:

• The mindset shift that helped him overcome imposter syndrome

• How to build and grow a CPG brand in today’s market

• What it’s really like to grieve a business post-exit

• The importance of staying in the game and putting in the reps

This interview is full of valuable lessons from one of Canada’s most inspiring entrepreneurs — check it out below!

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Manitoba Harvest Quick Stats:
(prior to exit)

🏭 Manufacturing Space: 80k Square Feet
🌾 Acres of Product: 75,000
🌍 Countries Sold In: 20
🌍 Retail Stores Sold in: 16,000
💵 Annual Revenue: $104 million
🎯 Exit Price: $419 million

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Launching Manitoba Harvest and Exceeding Expectations…

To go all the way back…

I grew up poor, with a single mom. That drove me to leave school when I was 14. 

I started working full time, but I wasn't educated about health, so I fell prey to junk food and weighed over 300 pounds by 18. 

Eventually, I had a rock bottom moment where I decided to change my lifestyle. I started studying and practicing natural health, and over time, led to me losing a lot of weight (over 100 lbs).

I was reading a ton of health books at the time, and by virtue of that, I learned a lot about good fats — the best sources of which are hemp seed and hemp seed oil. At the time, though, neither were available in North America. 

Also around that time, I met my co-founders, Martin and Alex, who were lobbying the government in Manitoba to legalize hemp. I always thought hemp was cool, but I fell in love with the nutritional properties of the hemp seed, so we started Manitoba Harvest in 1998 — a company that we grew over 20 years to over $100 million in annual revenue. 

By the end, we had over 80k square feet of manufacturing, grew over 75,000 acres of hemp and were selling to 16,000 retailer and 20 countries worldwide.

We were very fortunate to have had an opportunity to sell the business in 2019 for $419 million.

Overall I’ve done three nine figure exits — my first deal was $132 million. Then we sold Manitoba Harvest for $419 million, and then when we sold my first investment portfolio company Sol Cuisine, which was a $125 million exit.

The differences in CPG Then vs. Now…

There are so many different ways to go to market and a launch strategy, especially in the food and beverage industry. Whether it's direct to consumer first, an online approach, brick and mortar, or a combination of them.

There's not really one right way, but one that I really believe in — because it’s how Manitoba Harvest started — was more of the farmer's market approach. Back then, it was a classic way of doing business, not only on the sales side, but on the operations side, too. 

With the farmers market model, you’re not just controlling the amount that you're making and the amount that you're selling, you are also working one-on-one with your consumers, getting feedback from them at every stage of the growth process.

In 2024, some people are doing that with direct to consumer, by having email lists and social media outreach directly with their consumers. But it's a lot more impactful to get feedback in person, which is easier the closer you are to home.

If you target stores to sell your products that are close to your house, you can go there regularly and develop relationships more easily which will support retail sales and marketing execution and education.

That type of learning is more challenging to do when you’re in a different city than your customer.

Post-Exit Existentialism…

I like talking about it, because a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize that at the end of the journey, there's a grieving process.

In 2015, we sold the majority of Manitoba Harvest to a private equity partner…

Then in 2019, we sold the whole company to Tilray.

In the four years in between that, I knew my journey with Manitoba Harvest was going to come to an end, so I started dabbling in helping other businesses. 

Even still, when we sold the business in 2019, I grieved — in more ways than one. We sold the business, my wife and I decided to separate, and my mom died unexpectedly, all within five weeks of each other.

In the span of just over a month, I went from showing up at the business and leading a team, to not being welcome there. Then, suddenly I didn't have my kids half the time, and I also couldn't go visit my mom anymore. 

It took about six months to fully grieve and heal — I went into full monk mode to stay healthy and develop a positive mindset which was critical to build what the world sees of me now.

New Pursuits & the Beginnings of Coaching…

I wish I could say my new business model was super calculated. It’d probably make me sound smarter. But nothing was overly intentional — like creating sales funnels for investments or anything like that.

There were just a couple of things I started looking for…

I started scratching itches that I've had for some time, even though some are a totally different area of expertise. 

The connective tissue is that as an entrepreneur, I like making something out of nothing, and I've been well trained over the last 25 years to know what I don't know.

I learned I knew nothing about writing, publishing, and then marketing a book…
I knew nothing about podcasting…
I wasn't even on social media five years ago.

I'm just passionate about helping entrepreneurs grow personally and professionally, and these are ways for me to do that. As an added bonus — doing it helps me grow personally and professionally, too. 

The reality is: I'm not a natural at any of this. It's just trained behavior. 

I’ve put in the reps, I’ve gotten stronger at it over the years, and now it just seems like I’m a natural, even though it totally didn’t start that way.

And it all started by asking myself, what can I offer others?

I'm a good strategic planner. I know our industry well. I'm well connected to other founders because I've been operating in the space for over 25 years.

From there, I just began reaching out. I connected with other founders in the CPG space and had conversations with them, trying to understand the problems they were experiencing. 

In those conversations, I offered them some support, or told them what I would do if I was in their situation. After a thousand or so conversations, that naturally led to me investing in a handful of those companies. It also led to my coaching practice, where I coach a number of entrepreneurs weekly.

It also developed into my mass mentorship products — my book, my podcast, my newsletter, 60 Second Pitch and my mentorship toolbox — but it all just started with wanting to be helpful, and putting myself out there.

Investing in CPG Brands & Common Issues…

My investment thesis is pretty simple. 

Companies need to make products that I like — that I personally have in my house. Then, I like to meet the founders, who I also want to have in my house. Have them over for dinner, hang out, strategize. That sort of thing.

After that, it's really all about growth. As an entrepreneur that's grown a large business and exited, I have a good sense for it. 

What are the aspects of growth for those companies?
Are they self manufactured or are they co packed? 

Do they have a great margin structure? 

What are their velocities that they're selling in store?
How many units are they selling per week?

How do they compare against similar items on the shelf?
How is their message, their product different, or unique? 

All those things determine the likelihood of being able to scale and grow 5x, 10x from where they are right now.

And I should say, I am not an angel investor – as I invest at the venture stage of growth, not start ups.

I'm investing in businesses that are already doing $5 to $10 million in sales and then helping them grow to $50 or $100 million, because that's the expertise I have that not many people in our industry do. 

Then I ask questions like, is there a real opportunity for growth for this business? And can I help outside of my money — with my experience and expertise? 

If it checks all those boxes, then I go for it.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome…

I was never into social media before, so I didn't naturally want to put myself out there, and I felt awkward even when I was. 

So when I started sharing on LinkedIn, even though it was therapeutic for me to share some of my learnings, the imposter syndrome was there even after all my success…

Imposter syndrome and self-doubt are daily battles — we unknowingly do it every day to try to protect ourselves.

My mindset shift was that I am putting myself out there to help others and build community.

LinkedIn specifically, I changed the way I look at it, and now think of it as a 24/7 trade show. 

For two decades before that, I went to trade shows multiple times a year, and I loved them. I met new people, I checked out new products, I gave speeches. All of it was very natural, because it took place in person. 

Once I made the 24/7 tradeshow mindset shift, things became a lot easier for me on Linkedin.

A lot of people struggle with putting themselves out there, but if you’re used to doing it in person, it’s pretty easy to do it online. The real problem though is — a lot of the younger crowd haven't frequented trade shows, or similar events, which are really beneficial for developing a knack for sharing your story.

But here's what I've learned about imposter syndrome: anytime we do something new, there's a high likelihood that we're going to feel like we shouldn’t be doing it. It’s a protective mechanism. Your mind’s shielding you from embarrassment, failure, and risk. 

But without risk, we can’t live a full life.

I've experienced it, and I’ve seen it in so many successful people that I know — staying in the game and getting past imposter syndrome long enough is what creates huge success. 

That’s why I remind myself regularly, and encourage others to get out of their comfort zone and put themselves out there over and over.

On Cultivating a Positive Mindset…

It's all training…

Having an optimistic mindset, thinking the ‘best is yet to come’ and staying positive through hard times — it’s been all about focused effort.

It’s what I mentioned about my book and podcasting: none of it was natural to me before I put in the work. Once I put in the hours and the reps, it became intuitive.

But that’s the thing — it takes a lot of hours, and a lot of reps.

Which is why I teach people to start focusing on three things:

1. Being your best self,
2. Doing your best work
3. Building your best community

Being your best self means taking care of your physical and mental state. Prioritize sleep, hydration, and nutrition. Eat well, lift heavy stuff, get your heart rate up, do some kind of breath work and meditation. 

If you show up as your best self, it's a lot easier to go out and do your best work. And I say that as someone who was once 300 pounds — depressed and unclear on my values, purpose, or passions. 

I had to put in the work over and over again to better myself. 

My personal transformation with weight loss started a whole transformation in life. That's why I say it happens in that order: being your best self, doing your best work and then building your best community. 

The sequence is really important. 

All the great outcomes happened after I started focusing on being my best. I personally felt great, and started noticing other problems I could solve.

When I transitioned that thinking to the business I just thought hey, just chop wood and carry water … meaning do the work each day, and have faith. I tried not to determine the timelines of the outcomes. Instead, I focused on doing great work, knowing a great outcome would happen.

If we do the work and we stay in the game long enough, we're going to have a positive outcome. The only unknown is truly the timeline.

Most entrepreneurs would say that if you don't have a million-dollar business in five years, you’ve failed. Well, it took me five years to get there and it took 10 years to reach profitability. 

Ten years is a long time to have faith and just keep doing the right thing over and over, and know that because of your working it, you know, working diligently and doing good work, that there's going to be a positive outcome. 

And I’ve had those type of hesitations and doubtful moments every step through my career…

The first two years that we started Manitoba Harvest, I didn't get paid. I had to use every ounce of my savings that I built up over four years working construction to pay my rent and buy food and stuff.

Then we launched in the US and were attacked by the DEA — they were basically trying to ban hemp foods, which took over three years to resolve. 

That entire time, It felt like everything could come crashing down at any moment. 

That was more than humbling.

Actionable Things to Build a Better Business…

If you’re looking to grow, personally or professionally, you need a plan, and you need a governance cycle. 

So many things really come down to having an annual strategic plan that aligns to your budget, and gives you really clear operational strategies for sales, marketing, ops and finance. 

That's what we call “working on a business” instead of “working in the business”. 

In my opinion, it's the most effective way to grow, both personally and professionally. 

Large businesses have a board of directors, but when you're a smaller business, that may look like having an advisory board or a coach that can challenge you on what your assumptions are, and how to make them better. 

A lot of people start out with a plan but deviate away from it over time. And instead of checking in and readjusting, they completely stop planning, letting time go by until they feel like they’re out in the middle of the ocean without a paddle.

The reality is: you put yourself there, because that governance cycle of working on the business annually, quarterly, monthly, and weekly, is hugely critical. If you don’t, bad things can and will happen.

Thoughts on Legacy…

Listen, if I retired, I'd go crazy.

I have to do something, and I believe that's true for everyone. 

Your purpose can change, but you have to live that out. 

I'm a single, full-time dad to two teenagers, so family time is super important for me. That's one of the reasons why I've chosen to be a solopreneur. 

I had a team of 200 people, and now everything I do is through a third party contractor, because I want the freedom to be able to spend a lot of time on my personal life while building my businesses. So those are the guide rails that I've set up for myself. 

I had one income stream for 20 years, growing a business as a founder. Now I have seven income streams, and I want to do great in each one of those businesses.

Entrepreneurship in Canada…

It's easier to do business in Canada because Canada is a friendlier place with less competition.

Yeah, there are fewer VC firms, and the sentiment lately is a bit negative, but you can capitalize on that if you have a positive viewpoint. 

Less than 10% of the population nowadays is an entrepreneur, so we’ve been working to get entrepreneurs together and understand the business opportunity that Canada presents. To really create opportunity as an entrepreneur, you have to be proud of what you're doing, and you have to be vocal sharing your story.

Sharing your story will attract more customers, more peers, more friends, more investment, more positive political support, even. 

It’s why we launched the Canadian Entrepreneur Revival Tour event series.

The Entrepreneur Revival Tour aims to unite and inspire Canadian entrepreneurs across Canada. 

Jake Karls and I did our first one in Toronto, and over 300 people showed up, and it was a fabulous time. What we saw after was a number of entrepreneurs being inspired and feeling like they had more tools in their toolbox to successfully grow their business. 

I'm bullish on entrepreneurship in Canada — it’s been tough lately, but Canada is a great place to be an entrepreneur.

That’s it for issue this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry
  
  

This week, we’re featuring Tracy Shea-Porter — co-founder of Yes Unlimited, a company specializing in team building and leadership development for corporate teams through applied improvisation.

Tracy’s journey offers practical insights on:

• Combining diverse skills to create a unique offering

• Using a “Yes, and” mindset to seize unexpected opportunities

• Building long-term client relationships for sustainable growth

• Investing in self-care to stay effective and energized

Check out the full interview below!

Yes Unlimited Quick Stats:

📖 Favorite Business-Related Book: Atomic Habits
👥 Headcount: Two co-founders, 20 facilitators
⏳ Time in Business: 10 Years
💪 Number of Times She Almost Quit: Zero
💼 Average Deal Size or Engagement Size: $2K-$20K

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How Yes Unlimited Started…

When I was in my early twenties, I went to my very first improv class, and I haven’t left the community since. I became a performer as a hobby, and alongside that, I was in the corporate world.

I started off as a copywriter, doing event planning, marketing communications, and I worked for several companies over the years in telecom, publishing, and software technology. 

I worked at an agency doing PR…
I worked at Bell Canada for 10 years, doing B2B communication and marketing...
I worked in sales with startups and software companies…

I did all of that while I was doing improv, and slowly, all my improv knowledge — which is actually about really effective communication and creativity — seeped into my career.

I became known as a flexible, open, think-on-your-feet businessperson.

As a result, I would always be called on to help with employee engagement…

And about 10 years ago, those two worlds collided, and I ended up bringing my improv into my business world to form ‘Yes Unlimited.’

In a nutshell, we do ‘applied improvisation,’ which is taking principles from improv or sketch comedy and applying those skills to team building and leadership development.

What is Applied Improvisation…

In short: it teaches people how to think on their feet, while truly listening and inviting “yes, and” conversations.

It gives them skills for presentations, networking — all kinds of things.

We’re here to help educate about the value of applied improvisation and also psychological safety around it, too. 

Contrary to what a lot of people think, we’re not trying to turn them into performers.

The power really is in the debriefs after each exercise, in the conversations, and in helping people to understand the ‘sense of presence’ they experience.

When you’re doing improv, you can’t be anywhere else except in the present moment...

It helps train the brain to be present and open up to new ideas, and because you’re usually laughing as well, it creates a serotonin boost while you’re bonding with your teammates.

I strongly believe applied improvisation can change communication in the world.

It teaches the qualities that everyone needs.

You’re agreeing to listen and be receptive to new ideas.

If we lived in a world where everyone was always doing that — everything would change.

Leaving the Corporate World…

I got my latest corporate package. In other words: I got downsized.

Throughout my corporate career, there was always downsizing going on in the companies I worked at. When that happens, most companies tend to cut soft skills, and communications fits the bill easily, because we’re not revenue-generating.

Anyway, I got cut, and one day, a neighbor said, “Hey, do you want to try cold calling?”

And I flat-out said no.

She asked me a few times, and eventually, I thought, maybe I should just give it a try…

I tried it — and turns out I was really good at it.

All of a sudden, this company in Kentucky calls me up, tells me they loved my voicemail, and they wanted to fly me down to talk. So I went down to Kentucky, and within 20 minutes, they told me they wanted me to train their entire team.

Right off the bat, they gave me a $100k contract.

"That's how I became an entrepreneur - cold calling."

I almost feel like I was catapulted into this because I did not ever think I was going to be an entrepreneur.

I thought I would always be in the corporate world.

I think I went in that direction because it was the example my mother had set for me.

She was a working woman at a time when women weren’t working.

She was kind of a pioneer, so I just thought, “I’m going to get a corporate job because that’s what my mother did.”

Personally, I think it was a huge blessing…

If I hadn’t worked in the corporate world, I wouldn’t have learned how to run a business.

I worked so many different jobs over the years in all these different departments, and it developed my skills and confidence. If I hadn’t started out where I did, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

I really do believe a lot of the reason people succeed in business is they have a solid foundational knowledge and the confidence to try new things.

They’re not afraid to fail.

Being able to work in the corporate world alongside improv developed me into an open, accepting, empathetic leader, and I’m glad it’s a part of my history.

Niching Down…

A lot of corporations are already working with applied improvisation. It’s still niche, yet it’s actually been around in companies for a while. It’s not going away because it’s integral to effective communication skills.

Communication training in corporate environments is needed more and more, in my opinion.

I’m working on making applied improvisation part of onboarding in companies so that you can go right in and learn techniques for active listening. You go right in and learn how to communicate better so that you’re staying open to ideas and not shutting people down.

One thing when I’m doing training is I talk about the importance of ‘No.’

It’s a very important word when you’re creating boundaries. When you’re building dynamic teams that want to collaborate, ‘No’ tends to stop things. You want to stay open and really listen and hear one another. ‘No’ shuts things down in a way that isn’t positive, in that scenario.

On the topic of niching — I also wrote this book called The “Yes, And” Business Evolution.

Over the last four years, as I was growing my business, I realized I really wanted to be someone people think of when they think of applied improvisation.

So I dug into the niche and I did tons of research.

I really got to understand — even beyond my years of experience — how applied improvisation can help leaders create great teams. I wanted to become someone who really could deliver.

Customer Relationships and Acquisition — Now vs Then…

One of the common experiences we had early on was that people would come in and say, “I want a fun 1- or 2-hour improv event to make my team feel happy and connected,” and that was the extent of the relationship they wanted.

Now, we’re actively looking for multiple events over longer periods of time with clients. Making that transition, though, means working with decision-makers who plan their events sometimes years in advance, as well as collaborating on how to bring in applied improv as part of their actual learning and development programs.

It’s a longer-term strategy, and it’s more complex, yet it’s the direction we really want to head in.

Customer acquisition-wise: referrals through the theater community were huge, early on. Companies would come looking for applied improvisation teachers in the theater community — and because we have the SoCap Theater on the Danforth in Toronto — we got a steady flow of leads that way.

Now, our website and LinkedIn do a lot of that work. We use LinkedIn as a funnel toward our website, where people fill out requests and then get in touch.

Future Plans…

Definitely deepening my partnership with Great Place To Work. I’d love to do some more collaborative stuff with them. 

They work with companies that want to be great places to work by surveying their employees through confidential surveys. Then, those companies take action on the results.

And the reason I’m excited about working with companies that want to be great places to work is because they understand the value of applied improvisation as an important training tool.

Generally speaking, I really think partnerships like that can help you excel and level up.

I don't really think you can do it alone in business. If you sit alone, you're not going to grow as much as you need to – you need more activity going on outside yourself. 

Biggest Challenges in the Past…

Managing my energy has been the biggest one, by far — and I’ve gotten better over the years.

I just figured out that I need to be looking after myself first.

I’m a big fan of yoga…
I ride my bike every day…
I have a cat…
I have family and friends…

All of that helps immensely.

I’d also say that managing my energy through self-care has made me better at my job, too. I do a lot of facilitating day-to-day.

Facilitating doesn’t go very well if I walk in the room and I’m not dynamic or I’m not confident or I’m not inspiring.

If I look after myself, I can be those things.

I’m kind of fortunate that I’m a grounded person. Working in the business world for years and years, I did burn out a few times just from doing too much, yet luckily, in my case, I haven’t fallen off the cliff, if you will.

I’m always trying to make sure I’m finding that balance — identifying the things that I like to do and doing them. I’m a big proponent of that.

Scaling the Company…

It is very intentional. It’s just Ralph McLeod and I, though.

The facilitator team that we use — they’re all self-employed, and while they work with us, they’re not employees.

We’re incorporated, we work with an accountant, we have a lawyer. We have all those things in place, so there is intention around monthly revenue, annual, year to year.

They may not be as strict or stringent, though, as they might be with larger teams.

I’m looking at significant growth, though, structurally, things are going to stay the same for the foreseeable future. Ralph and I are going to remain the two co-founders of the incorporated company. The facilitators will continue to be self-employed. We’ll just need more of them.

Right now we’ve been outsourcing things like marketing support, web development, et cetera. Yet I do think there is a possibility of taking on some employees down the line. We’ll see how that goes over the next year with some of the partnerships we’re working on!

Managing Budgets and Outsourcing…

I think what really informs me is my business background.

I know how to run a business from the years I spent in the corporate world…

Having said that, there is a phrase that I learned early on that I think is a good one for everyone, which is: do what you do well and hire the rest.

In other words: you don’t have to do it all.

It’s not a good idea because everyone tends to be good at certain things, yet nobody’s good at everything.

I’m a writer, facilitator, leader — I’m not a finance person, that’s why I hired an accountant, and that’s why I would hire a lawyer or a marketer.

On Failure…

I try to not fear failure. I can’t overstate that.

I don’t mind failing, and that’s in large part because of improv. When I fail, I know that’s a pathway to growth because it means that I’m trying new things, and I’m learning. If you don’t fear failure, that growth isn’t just limited to your personal life. It translates to business, too.

Building a successful and sustainable business does not happen in six months. This whole time, I’ve had no funding. I’ve thrown myself into a little debt. And I don’t mind that because the way I look at it: you have to give yourself the time and space to figure it out.

Planning is very important. Sometimes too much planning can stop you from taking action. Yes, you need to forecast. I also think there’s immense value in being improvisational, following your intuition, being guided by what you want to have happen.

Final Thoughts…

I’ve been traveling around a while now, and I want to let people know that every single person has a unique voice that’s important. I notice people don’t always have confidence in themselves. If there’s one thing that I like to really let everyone know, it’s that you really are important, because only you can be you, and only you can make that difference.

Whole worlds can open if you just keep walking the steps and seeing what happens. Let go of perfectionism, this idea that you have to be 100% great at everything. Embrace making mistakes as a positive, happy thing, because it means you’re growing.

To bring it all back: I think that applied improvisation teaches you all that. Take an improv class, check it out in your neighborhood, and get in touch!

I’m here to help people communicate better, and as far as I can tell, the world needs this skill. “Yes, And!”

That’s it for issue this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

This week, we’re featuring Cynthia Arscott — creator of Goldminds — a mindfulness & sleep app for kids.

In just a few weeks since launching the app, they’ve hit over 11k downloads and have more than 3000 paying subscribers, but of course, it wasn’t a straight line to get there!

Cynthia’s story is packed with valuable lessons, including:

• Leveraging an existing community for customer acquisition

• Listening closely to your target audience to guide product-market fit

• Pivoting consistently to find a version that works

Honestly it’s one of my favorite interviews to date — check it out below!

Goldminds Quick Stats:

💰 Capital Invested: $100k
👥 Current Paid User Count: 3,000+
📲 App Downloads: 11,000+
🚀 Launched: September 10th, 2024

Subscribe now

Why did you start Goldminds?

Goldminds is a mindfulness app for kids that helps them learn different mindfulness skills through stories.

I myself am a meditation and mindfulness teacher, and I got started back when I was working in tech. 

I was at Uber Eats in partnerships, and while I was working there, I experienced a lot of anxiety myself. 

When I was trying to get to the bottom of where it was coming from and how I could solve it, I came across meditation and mindfulness, and it had a really big impact on me.

I was able to control my mind and see past my anxiety.

I was a very anxious kid. I went through different challenging situations with friends — I guess you could call it bullying in some capacity…

Those things really got to me when I was younger, but it wasn’t until I started practicing mindfulness, I realized that I could’ve really used those mindfulness tools back when I was a kid. 

So I decided to get certified to teach meditation and mindfulness.

How you started…

Originally, I was very naive. 

I thought I could launch programs in person in schools to teach mindfulness to kids. I have a really good friend who does karate programs in schools, and she helped me get it into a school to test it out. 

So, one day on my lunch break at Uber, I drove to this school, and taught this group of, like, seven year olds mindfulness for 30 minutes, and it went really well. 

I think I did four of those in total. 

They went great, but it was right before the winter break. Around that time, I decided to leave my job at Uber to work somewhere remote, because I wanted to start to build up this business, but needed an income while I did it. 

So I joined this other software company that was totally 100% remote.

I worked there for a couple months and kept trying to build the classes business on the side, but then all school programs shut down during COVID, and I didn't really have an opportunity to even explore that option much further. 

Like a lot of people at the time, I went with the trend of introducing virtual classes. I’d hold them every Monday evening after work, then as the classes got more and more popular during the pandemic, we filled out Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays. 

At that point, I thought I had made it — but actually wasn’t even close. 

It was really labor intensive and wasn't scalable at all. 

And what followed was two or three years of utter confusion on what my actual offering was. 

I knew what I wanted to teach kids, but the channel was still very blurry. 

I did a bit of virtual, I did a bit of in person when that came back, and that was the mix until the pandemic was over. 

Then I was pregnant with my son, and a software company came to me and said, hey, we can make a white labeled app for you for pretty cheap, like $300 a month. Do you want to try it?

I knew I wouldn’t be able to do all of the classes with a newborn, so I agreed.

So I recorded about a hundred of these kids' meditations and stories I was doing in schools, and that became the very first version of the app.

Finding product market fit…

For a long time, I tried to keep the classes going while working on the digital product, because I didn't know which one was going to take off. 

I was trying to go where the money was, but I still hadn't figured that out yet. 

I ended up keeping some school programs, but because I couldn't teach them myself, hired teachers to teach them for me. 

And to test out the app, and see if it was actually worthwhile, I gave it out for free to 300 families in these schools. The offer was basically, hey, as a part of this school program that the school has paid for, you get this free app for three months. 

The feedback I got was incredible…

People would come to me and say, “This app is putting my kid to sleep in five minutes. Our bedtime routine is easier. This is now a staple. Can you add more of these stories?” 

After that I knew there was something there — but it wasn’t what I originally planned…

Instead of mindfulness, it was sleep. 

And I was a new parent, so I was just discovering that as parents, all we care about is sleep getting our kids to sleep.

So really, our product changed in that moment from being a mindfulness tool to a sleep tool, which is what made parents more interested in it. 

Then, last summer, I was one of the winners of the Visa ‘She's Next’ Grant. 

I went to this big event, got to meet a lot of different founders and had a chance to explain my business — how I was doing the school programs — and it's an app for kids. 

But the way I was explaining it, nobody knew what I was talking about at first. 

Then, everyone was slowly like, oh, like headspace for kids? 

That phrasing shifted my whole perspective. I knew that was the direction I needed to head in. 

So I phased out school programs, which was a direct cut to revenue and maybe kept one or two schools here and there to help keep the lights on. 

From there, I started looking for a CTO. 

I went on Y combinator, put up a profile, and decided I was going to build an app to host these stories that were putting kids to sleep. And shockingly, I found the best CTO ever. 

I interviewed maybe three or four people and I found him — we started working together instantly. 

He built the entire app and that was how I transitioned it into a product.

Staying the course…

The entire process from those virtual programs until launching the app three weeks ago — that timeframe was about three years.

Not to use it as an excuse, but the Pandemic was a very confusing time to be a business owner. 

There was a lot of back and forth. Some days I’d be like, What the hell am I doing? And then other days, I know exactly what I'm doing. This is it. 

For some reason —and I, to this day, don't really know why — I just knew this was such a good idea that I was never going to quit. I would always pivot and iterate because I knew there was a way to get these tools to kids. I just wasn't 100% sure what the channel was going to be.

I didn't necessarily want to be an app. 

Having worked at Uber, I wasn't expecting myself to go be the CEO of a tech company, but also, I think Cynthia from three years ago couldn't have handled what Cynthia now can handle.

It was a long and difficult process, but I needed that time to develop confidence and be so damn sure of myself that nobody could tell me what I was doing was stupid.

Setting the pricing model… 

I funded everything through the revenue we made from classes and through grants.

I won probably three or four grants, so that was the reason why this product was able to come to life in terms of financing the upfront costs.

And in terms of deciding on a pricing model — I just did a lot of competitor research. 

I saw what other people were charging in the space and I decided in order to be a subscription that people don't cancel, it couldn’t cost more than a cup of coffee.

People can rationalize a cup of coffee, but once you get past $8, $9, $10, people start to drop off.

So, that's exactly what we ended up launching with — it's $4.99 USD per month and then $35.99 per year. 

Brand positioning & acquiring customers…

One thing I've realized over the past couple of years is that nobody really wants to follow a brand — they want to follow a person. So, what I wanted our brand to look and feel like was just a bunch of parents that were building this app and doing it in service for kids and other parents.

I wanted it to be really personal. 

I didn't want it to be like other apps, because if you go and look at other app pages, they're very boring — not to be mean, but they are. 

Their content is very educational, and I didn't really want to be an educational space for parents — I just wanted it to be really easy to use, and give it more of a community feel.

I knew I had the product down, I knew I had the right team, but what I really needed was a community to actually launch this product toward. 

That was when I decided to bring somebody onto my team, but I was trying to figure out who it was. 

Was it going to be a sleep expert?
A psychologist?
A child therapist?

Over time I realized I should bring the person on the team who's had the most impact on me as a mom and somebody whose community that I'm a part of — that I believe in. 

That person is Rachel from Hey Sleepy Baby.

She has the most engaged mom community I've ever seen and been a part of, so I knew I needed her to teach us her magic and to help us do the same thing for our brand, because our audience is largely the same — it’s a bunch of parents and caregivers who are looking for sleep support and want their kids to fall asleep.

So originally the conversations were about whether it could be a partnership, and as time went on, I was like — no, I want you to be a founding member of this team. 

So that's what we did! 

And our marketing/launch strategy was really built around that announcement. 

We launched our waitlist a week before we launched the app. So it was a very short timeframe, but we got about 4000 people within a week. And then we launched to that audience a week later.

Ever since, our strategy has just been the two of us sharing how the app is working and to heavily monitor our DM's. 

After all, that's where your community is, right? 

For the last three weeks, I've pretty much spent all my days in my DMs, collecting reviews and feedback and feature requests. And that just fueled what we shared. 

Now we only share things on our feed that are either customer reviews, questions that we're answering for our audience, or features we are adding to the app because our audience wants them. 

Goal setting…

Well, we launched to a waitlist of 4000, which blew my mind. 

We're now just over a month post-launch, and we have 11,000 people who have downloaded it, so we surpassed any initial goal by a lot!

I think I'm a little shell shocked if I'm being honest. 

At this point, it's just growing and being able to maintain the amount of users we have, so we're just going to keep setting paid user goals. 

By the end of this year, I'd love to get to between 5000 and 7000 paid users. 

That would be my next goal. 

Creating the content and experimenting with AI…

Everything on the app is written by me, but I collect feedback from our audience, and ask them what stories they want their kids to listen to. 

I’m constantly asking customers questions:

What does your kid like?
Do they love dinosaurs? 
Unicorns? 
What kind of themes do you want the story to be about? 
Do you want it to be about gratitude? 
Transitioning back to school?
Falling asleep? 

I get all of my ideas from our users, and I always have. 

I've just always asked Instagram, what do you want to see? 

And then I just write the stories based on that.

I record it all in a studio my friends have down the street from me.

I'm still trying to find a way to scale that, because it takes up a lot of time, but for now, the content plan is two things: 

One, have a monthly challenge. Every single month, we're going to have new content hosted by an expert to keep things interesting, and keep people engaged. 

We're also going to be releasing other content, probably five to ten additional stories every month, inspired by the audience and their requests and their themes. 

This month, I have Halloween-themed stories and some other longer ones people have requested. 

It’s like 30 minutes straight of me talking, which, as you can imagine, takes a lot of time to produce. 

I did it this weekend and I put myself to sleep four times. 

I recorded four times in a row and after the fourth take was like — I'm done for the day. 

So that's another thing I have to figure out… 

We have experimented with using AI read stories — that could take a lot of pressure off me, and can actually produce custom content based on the user’s profile information, but the flip side is people want a human to speak to them, and obviously I have a much softer, more nurturing voice than AI does. 

And the problem with AI is the better the ‘voice’ is, the more it costs. 

When we first launched, we had this really good AI voice, but it was really expensive. People were loving this custom stories feature and everyone was just generating stories but we were blowing through our budget like every day.

So we're playing around with that. 

But if we can get the voice to be really good, that would save a lot of time because even though I still write the stories, I don't always need to narrate it. 

It’s just been a ‘let's try it’ kind of situation. 

I had the general idea, my CTO figured it all out from a technical point of view, and it's arguably been our most popular feature. The kids freak out when they hear their names in the story, which is so cool, and they think the story is about them, which is great!

I knew how popular personalized stories were for kids... 

My son has a book that was gifted to him — his name is Archer, and it was like, ‘Archer the Panda’, and he loves it, so I wondered how we could implement something similar in our app. 

But, yeah, it was just a trial and error situation. 

There wasn't a ton of thought or strategy, other than I know this is popular right now, and I think we can find a way to include it into our app.

Balancing parenting with business building…

I have an interesting balance. 

I have a two year old son, and he's watched by my mom in the morning, from about 8:30 to 11:30. 

During that time, I work like a mad woman doing all kinds of things. 

I work well under pressure, so I try to write content only a couple days before I'm recording, because I know I can get myself to focus really well. 

The content, overall, takes a lot of time… 

I plan to record once per month, so I get everything written and done and I go into the studio once per month. 

I'm trying to figure out how that's going to work as we scale because I do think we need more than that, so I'm trying to convince my husband to build me a studio in our house.

But for the most part, I'm working with our team on featured content daily.

I'm the one behind the Instagram Stories. I'm not doing the posts, but I'm doing the actual stories and talking to our audience. 

I'm also the support person, answering all of our customer emails. 

Once my son wakes up from his nap — he naps from about 12-2 at this point — I'm done working by then.

I'm with him every afternoon and then I start work again when he goes to bed. My husband does his bedtime and then I pick up any extra time on the weekends here and there.

It's only been the last three weeks since things have really picked up, honestly, so I’m sure our routines will change again…

Present challenges…

Before we launched, I would have said cash flow, but since we've launched, I'm feeling very comfortable with that — it’s a huge relief honestly, because I spent years being very concerned about it. 

Now, I just think I need to hire someone to be able to do what I can do, either a VA or an assistant or something like that…

I haven't figured out exactly what that looks like, but I hold too many tasks, and I really need to get better at delegating and outsourcing. 

But here’s the thing:

people tell you that you need to spend money to make money, but unfortunately when you’re starting out, there’s a ton of trial and error as to what you're spending your money on and what the ROI is going to be.

I spent so much money outsourcing things, thinking that it was going to help me grow, and it didn't. 

That really just made me not want to outsource, because I didn't have the cash flow to experiment. So I just felt like I had to learn everything myself and do everything myself. 

I think I'm finally at a point where I can legitimately outsource things, because we’re subscription based and the cash flow is relatively consistent, I can see exactly what our monthly recurring revenue is going to be, which really helps.

Financing the app…

There's a couple ways to look at it.

In terms of what I have spent on it over the last couple of years, probably $100,000 between grant money, my own savings, and reinvested revenue, but there's also the opportunity cost of not having a salary.

So when you look at that factor in that I haven't paid myself, even until today, it’s like three years of no salary — it was a huge risk.

But to be honest with you, I'm of the mentality that high risk equals high reward. 

I'm confident, even just within three weeks of our launch, I'll be okay and we'll continue to grow because the numbers right now show us that our conversion rate from free to paid users is really high.

Future plans…

To be honest, I battle with wanting it to be a big company, but also wanting it to stay small. 

I don’t mean small in revenue, rather “small” as in a small business. 

I do not want to be somebody who works 9-5, Monday to Friday — I’m planning on having more kids, and I want to be afforded as much as I need to spend with them. 

I would love for this business to continue to grow, but I don't want pressure to do one thing or another from investors. I've bootstrapped it this far, and I don't feel like I need outside investment because we don't have a huge customer acquisition cost.

Usually, it's expensive to acquire customers, but I knew I could do this organically as a starting point and then introduce ads later. So, to be fully transparent, I would like to keep this as a big small business, where, ideally, I have five employees, and we'd run it the same way and just keep going. 

I don't have big plans to be, like, the next Uber or anything like that, but if somebody wants to come around and turn us into that, then we’ll see. laughs

That’s it for issue this issue!

Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!

If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry

For starters:

The Come Up highlights successful business owners ‘come-up’ stories in an easy-to-read, written interview format.

We send out weekly interviews with lessons and actionable insights on everything business related. Whether it’s sharing marketing initiatives that did or didn’t work, or managing the mental side of entrepreneurship, there’s no glossing over challenges — we care about it all, from the big wins to the little ideas that didn’t work before finding that thing that finally ‘clicked.’

How We Got Here…

I started The Come Up because I was frustrated with business content that was—excuse the term…‘overly reductive bullshit’.

Having built a number of businesses myself, when I would read a lot of this stuff, I honestly just got pissed off at how easy it made things seem…

Things like:
“How I made $10M in 10 minutes on Twitter”
or
“how to seller finance your way to an empire…”

No shade to anyone, it just seemed disingenuous and oversimplified.

Like a sugary snack that maybe got you excited for a minute, but didn’t actually get you understanding what it ACTUALLY took to get there.

It seemed to miss all the little moments of self-doubt or ‘WTF have I done’ moments that got in the way.

Turns out I wasn’t alone, and the ‘TikTokification’ of entrepreneurship has caused a lot of people to either underestimate the effort required, or think “WTF is wrong with me? They make it look so easy!”

As a result, I decided to launch my own series, where we take super successful business owners, and ask them about the WHOLE picture — not just the highlights, but also the struggles and setbacks along the way.

The hope is it gives a more authentic look into entrepreneurship and arms you with the tools and lessons to make better decisions in your own journey.

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I’d love to hear from you to learn more about what you’re working on, what interests you, what doesn’t, and hear your thoughts about how the publication can improve over time.

Thanks so much for the support! 🙏

- Alex

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Or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!

For this issue: Bryan Beer—a business broker and advisor who entered the industry after selling his exiting his own business in 2023!

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Before Canadian Hot Tubs Inc.

To rewind and go way back — I used to work as a management consultant. One of those jobs where you fly to work on Sunday night and fly home on Friday night. 

I can’t lie, that kind of job is fun for a while. With the way those consulting projects work, you live project to project, and you can sometimes get three to four weeks off at a time. 

But the guys who were the managers — the ones who had been doing it for 20 years — they were all divorced. 

They’d get back from a day of work on whatever project they were on, go down to the bar in their hotel, get drunk, go to bed at eleven and do the whole thing the next day. From a lifestyle perspective, it wasn’t the best career path for me.

So again, it was fun for a while, but wasn’t really for me — and as it turns out, I actually got laid off. I was living with my then-girlfriend, now wife. So I was on UIC, I was unemployed. My wife is an occupational therapist, and she was working at St. Mike's Hospital in Toronto. 

We kind of got wind where things were going in the private sector. So, she started as a contractor, working with people who were in motor vehicle accidents. 

While she was doing it, I really had nothing else to do but go to a cafe, sit, drink coffee, and think about what to do. Eventually, I convinced her that we could do what she was doing better than the place where she worked, even though we only had three months industry experience between the two of us. I found a six month contract at another consulting firm, so that gave us an income to bridge the gap before we started our company. 

Once we did — it took off very quickly.

It's funny to think about it now. For the first two years, we didn't even have a computer. We had a phone, a fax machine, and our photocopier was a roll of nickels.

We’d go to the corner store for all our photocopying. 

We had a really good run for ten years. The business was successful, we were growing, and we were profitable, but things changed quickly, and four months later, we were out of business. 

Not because of a lack of clients, strangely enough, but because of government legislation changes that ruined our business model. 

After that, I made a really bad investment in the candle industry. 

I met a guy, through a mutual friend who was an inventor. He had some IP in the candle industry. So our plan was to get a patent in place and license this IP.

All of a sudden — without literally any experience in the candle industry — I’m down at the National Candle Association convention in Orlando in 2004, selling this product. 

It was crazy. People were lining up, stealing our samples. People had video cameras, filming what we were doing. Remember: this was before camera phones, so videoing stuff was a big deal. 

It was just insane. So, I call my wife, and I’m like hey, we better start figuring out the best Porsche dealer to buy from. laughs

Around that time though everybody just started to get killed by Chinese imports. American candle producers experienced a huge downturn.

Everybody liked our idea and our products — we had meetings with all the big players in the candle industry — but it was just the wrong timing. So it just never happened. 

The push for globalization and moving manufacturing overseas got really serious during that time, so the macro trends badly affected us again — the lesson there being it’s all about the wave theory…you've got to catch the right wave at the right time for everything to go right, and in our situation, that just wasn’t the case.

First attempts at buying a business…

With the first business we bought together, my wife had a job at the time — which is a tip for any budding entrepreneur. Having some kind of steady salary is key, or at least certainly helpful, when you’re starting out. 

It helps not only from a cash flow perspective, but also, it is something banks look at if you’re looking to borrow money and take on debt. They’re more likely to lend because they know you don’t need to pull money out of the company right away and you have some stability to make longer term decisions.

But either way, I had been out on my own for twelve or 13 years at that point, and I remember thinking that I was unemployable. 

I'm an electrical engineer by trade, so I was way out of date, largely because I wasn’t working in that field, and I hadn’t kept up with the tech. But also, I didn’t think anyone was gonna hire me cause they’d feel like, given my history, I was just looking for a job until I could find another business. 

At least that's how it felt. 

Then another thing came along. A friend of mine from McGill who had a lot of experience in merchant banking started a capital pool company, which is a TSX thing. I came on and we had big plans to do something. 

Instead of doing a normal reverse takeover, which you normally do with cash flow companies, we were going to buy a company and operate it. 

So anyway, we entered into a purchase agreement for a company called Afton Foods, which was in Toronto. They were in bankruptcy protection, but they still were turning out about a million a year in EBITDA. 

They had two brands which you may or may not remember: One was 241 Pizza and the other one was Robin's Donuts, which was obviously getting absolutely beat up by Tim Hortons, but they still had something like 125 stores throughout Nova Scotia and Ontario. 

Anyway, we entered into a purchase agreement, conditional on financing, but we just couldn't get the financing done. It was only for $12 Million, too.

Normally, $12 million would be a slam dunk. Still, somehow we just couldn't get it done. But we were kind of the de facto CEO's of Robin's Donuts and 241 Pizza for, like, six months. 

It left me with a kind of a bad taste in my mouth about Bay Street and investment banking and stuff like that. 

Then came the hot tubs…

With every cloud, there's a silver lining, right?

I'd been lucky again as things weren't working out with that deal, and I was constantly online looking at websites for businesses for sale.

Really, you can look for years before you find something that's of interest to you geographically. I found this business, and the first thing that piqued my interest was it was in my area code.

What I liked about it was that the hot tub business had been around since the mid seventies. And this is in 2008, mind you. The original owner had done really well with it, but he was kind of neglecting it, and it was heading downhill. 

But I liked the product. It was just so well differentiated, so unique. 

This was a manufacturer, so not only was it a very niche product, but it had 350 million potential customers across North America, because they lend themselves to being shipped. And I used to tell people: whether you lived in Mississauga, Ontario, or Madison, Wisconsin, it literally didn't matter to us. There's a little more paperwork and some extra cost to get it across the border, but really it was all the same to us.

So we closed the deal on July 15, 2008, and of course, October 2008 the world came to an end with the housing and financial crisis.

It was impeccable timing once again, but somehow we kept going!

At the end of the day, I knew where we needed to go — digital marketing, social media, all of those things. But I'm not that guy. I don't have Facebook, even…

So I knew where we had to go. I just didn't know how to get there, and didn't have a lot of extra cash to do it. 

On deal hunting vs. buying a solid business…

I never really put that much thought into it.

As an owner-operator, looking for a deal when there’s a finite amount of money involved — getting something in your price range, finding something locally, finding something that you can run that doesn't require a lot of specialized knowledge — it’s hard to accomplish. Because hey, I went into the hot tub business with no experience. I was selling these hot tubs when I'd never even been in one. 

With some businesses — plumbing, heating, electrical, for instance — it's hard to buy them unless you have that knowledge. But with this business, I felt it was simple enough that even if I didn't have any industry experience, I could figure it out.

It was neglected. It was run down. It went from the original owner to his stepson but the stepson figured out quickly that he wasn't cut out to be an entrepreneur, so I bought it off him. 

It was beaten down, and obviously, if it's beaten down, it keeps the price down. When you don’t have very deep pockets, that’s the only kind of deal you’re looking for.

How intentional was working towards an exit?

Well, I'll rewind it a little…

When Covid hit, we shut down for two months. End of March to the end of May. 

At the time, I literally just sat there and thought, well, this is the end of the line. The world's going to be in a recession. Who's going to buy a hot tub?

I thought we would have to sell our house to pay off our loans and suppliers. But my wife — who's never taken an economics class in her life, mind you — figured that people will probably keep buying tubs because they're not traveling. 

I flat out disagreed. I was like, I've studied economics and it doesn't work that way. 

Naturally — she nailed it. She predicted the whole staycation and home improvement phenomenon that we saw from 2020-2022.

When I say we shut down, I meant fully shut down. Like, I didn't look at the email or anything for two months. When I finally did it was just like hundreds of emails and voicemails. 

Turns out it was a lot of fun for that year or two, because there was so much demand and so little supply. Everyday was just improvisation and juggling a hundred balls. The business was doing really well. 

So anyway, I was sitting in the TIFF Bell LightBox Theatre on King Street West,with my two kids, watching Glass Onion — that movie with Daniel Craig. And I don't know what it was, but I just thought, it's time to sell. 

This was in November 2022. Our year-end was coming up, so we'd have fresh financials. I was turning 60 on my next birthday. And more than anything, the older you get, the more risk averse you get, right? 

You can fail when you're 40 and still have time to recover. When you're 60, you just run out of time. 

I also started to worry that if something were to happen to me, the business would be in trouble, and that trouble would translate back to my family. 

In the past, you can ignore those thoughts — or you can write off the idea that something won’t happen to you, but of course, that's just not realistic. 

So that really got to me. I wanted to take some money off the table because a large chunk of our net worth was tied up in that little business. So, yeah, I can literally remember to that point where something went off in my head. 

The process of selling his business…

I started by convincing my wife. 

After that, I started looking around and I talked to some business brokers, and that's how I got connected to TransWorld Business Advisors. 

From day one — they were on it. 

They saw the value in the company, so it was an easy decision to go with TransWorld. 

We took it to market and one of the buyers who came in very quickly was actually kind of aligned with one of our customers. 

So it all worked out. They came in hot and ended up buying the business.

It's one of multiple businesses for them. They've got deeper pockets, lots of resources, whereas for the most part, it was just me in charge. And oddly enough, I initially told myself I wouldn't sell it for x, but I'd sell it for y. 

We valued it exactly in between, and that's what it sold for. 

Trends that make good and bad businesses… 

At Transworld Ontario our bread and butter are businesses that sell for $300K to $3M but we handle much larger deals as well. We like manufacturing, distribution, contractors but we are completely industry agnostic.

Buyers generally look for like three good years of consistent or growing financials. And it’s not that you can't sell a business when it's declining, but you’ll have fewer buyers interested and unless somebody can see some untapped potential or something, you probably won’t get an amazing offer. 

The other thing is that I see — and keep in mind, I lived this — don't leave it too long.

Anybody who's a boomer or boomer adjacent needs to start thinking about selling within the next year or two. Whether it's another Covid or a health event, things can change very quickly so it’s good to quit while you’re ahead.

There are so many people I talk to who are in their 70s, who run a CNC shop or distribution business or something, that five years ago was doing a million in sales. Then, all of the sudden, Covid happened, and now they’re 75, and just getting by. You can leave it too long. 

Another thing is: selling a business isn't a DIY project. Yeah, you could be a great plumbing contractor, but selling a business requires a different set of skills. 

It's also time consuming as hell, and emotional, because you've tied up so much in that business. If you have a business broker there, you can kind of get some clinical detachment and make better decisions than if you're all alone.

Think of it this way: lawyers get lawyers and doctors get doctors, right? You need some objectivity.

Why he went the ETA route
(entrepreneurship thru acquisition)...

Well, I think when it comes to businesses out there — like startups — where you've got to come up with a really good idea to be successful, I was just never that creative. ETA just appealed to me more.

I think people are also conditioned with the idea that being a founder is sexy. People want to be the next Steve Jobs and all that.

But there's $2 trillion worth of businesses in Canada — Boomer owned businesses — that are going to need to change hands in the next ten years. Only about 20% of those have some sort of family succession plan, so that leaves $1.6 trillion worth of businesses that need to be taken over. 

It's just so vital for the economy that those businesses continue. Not only that, but when a new buyer buys them, they bring in new money, new energy, new ideas. They improve those businesses.

Advice for those considering ETA…

First off, understand that it's a long process.

To find a business that fits your budget, that fits your geography, that fits your skill set — it usually takes years. 

Yes, technically there are a lot of low hanging fruits — like pizza places — but the upside on businesses like that is almost non-existent.

What I saw in hot tubs was the opposite. I saw that we weren't limited to Kitchener-Waterloo. We had literally all of North America to tap into. 

So yeah, to see something that really jazzes you, it's a long process, and then even if you do find something, it's very competitive to get. 

A couple of my colleagues sold a business in North York a month or so ago — a nice business that sold for like $2.4 million. 

But to get there, they had almost 300 NDAs signed by potential buyers. 

Even if you like the business and you have the money, the probability of closing it is still fairly small. 

What he would’ve done differently…

If you take over a business, and you have the money and the resources — make changes fast. Don't drag it out over too many years. 

Another thing: A lot of people who want to buy businesses have never really thought through how they're going to finance it. I talked to a guy just a couple days ago, and he was like, I want to buy a business in this space, but I want no money down and 100% vendor take back. 

I had to stop him and say,  sorry but it doesn't work like that. Maybe on YouTube videos or maybe in some deals in the US, but not here. 

So yeah, figure out how you're going to finance before you get too far. Because like I mentioned with the Robin’s Donuts thing — all the pieces were in play, but that stopped us dead in our tracks.

Downsides of ETA…

I don't hear this as much as I did a long time ago: most people, including your friends and your family, don't understand entrepreneurship. 

They say things like, oh, man, it must be nice to be your own boss. You get to take as many vacations as you want and have as much time off as you want.

They couldn't be more wrong, but they don't understand that. People who want to buy a business need to know what they're getting into. It's lonely. 

“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Living out your dream comes with certain consequences. You can feel like you are trapped. You have a good chunk of your net worth tied up in a very illiquid asset and unlike people who work a 9-5, you can’t just quit and find a new job.

It's definitely not all wine and roses. 

Last min advice…

Make your business plan, have all your financial models, your projections, your pro formas, crunch every number down to the nth degree — and then when everything's done, cut the expected revenue in half and double the expected costs. 

If you're still showing a profit, you're probably okay. 

Things never turn out as rosy as they do when you're writing a business plan, so leave lots of room for error.

That’s it for issue this issue!

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• Interview by: Alex Tribe

• Edited by: Angus Merry